Vaporware

by Richard Dansky

  “Just go look at his desk, and don’t tell me if there’s anything sticky there, OK?”

  Offering accepted, sort of. I didn’t say anything further, not wishing to push my luck, and instead pocketed the dead webcam before walking to Terry’s desk. Michelle kept quiet, too, though I could hear faint echoes of Leon providing worthless suggestions and advice.

  Something had happened there, I saw when I reached it. Terry’s chair was flipped over, backwards, on the floor. It looked like he’d left in a hurry. His desk was a mess as well, speakers on their sides and monitors turned at angles that would have been damn near impossible to use for work.

  “Ryan?” Michelle’s voice, hesitant.

  “Not now,” I answered. “Hold on one minute.” Slowly, I leaned forward to examine the new angle the monitors made. Something about it triggered a thought…there. A look over the top of one confirmed it.

  I was staring at a desk that had a length of cable dangling off of it. That cable, I was quite certain, had previously been attached to a webcam. He’d moved the monitors for privacy, which meant that he’d found the webcams.

  A memory struck me, the woman-shape Terry had been caressing staring directly into the camera and smiling. No, Terry hadn’t found the camera. Terry hadn’t been in no shape to notice anything. She’d done it. Maybe he’d moved the monitors, but that was all.

  And now he was gone.

  “All right,” I breathed into the phone. “He was here, he’s gone, and he left in a hurry. I’ve also got circumstantial evidence that he and Miss Zinger, or whatever that thing was, did something after our connection shorted out. What, I’m not daring to speculate.”

  “Ewwww.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine on that,” I told her. “But he’s gone. Do you still want pictures?”

  She thought for a minute. “Yeah, not that they’ll do any good. But give it a shot.”

  “OK,” I told her, and started snapping away. Monitors, chairs, speakers, dead webcams, you name it. A thought struck me, and I put the phone to my ear. “Hold on a minute,” I told Michelle. “I want to try something.”

  “Nothing stupid,” she said, but I was already putting it down on the table.

  Terry’s system was off, unlike most of the others in the room. It had most certainly been on earlier, and I was curious to see whether it would still boot up or if it had been fried by his encounter. The case was under his desk, placed there to save desktop footprint, so I dropped to my knees and hit the power switch.

  Nothing.

  I pressed it again, and held it. Still nothing. Faintly, I could hear Michelle demanding to be told what the hell I was doing. I ignored her, and pressed the button. Third time was the charm, or so the story went, and I pressed and held it for a full ten seconds.

  There was a shriek of static from my phone, and Michelle’s voice halfway through calling my name before it was abruptly cut off. White light flooded the room over my head, and I debated for an instant whether it was worth it to look and see what was making it.

  Brave man, that’s me all the way. The light grew brighter. I peeked up over the edge of the desk.

  I didn’t see a woman, at least, and that was a plus. No face, no anomalous features, no static shaping itself into something I’d rather not see. Instead, there was just light pouring out of the monitor, light so intense that it could only be described as pure.

  One by one, the other monitors in the room started showing it as well. Beams of brilliance shot out, one to the next, and the brightness was a sudden knife to my eyes. My fingers jabbed at the power switch on Terry’s system, but it didn’t do any good. More and more light poured out while the whine of the fan inside his CPU case reached an agonizing pitch. All across the room, the process repeated until it sounded like the computers were screaming, howling in agony at what they were being forced to do.

  I couldn’t see any more. There was too much light, too much brilliance. Everywhere I looked was white. I shut my eyes, but it did no good. The webwork of veins in my eyelids stood out, bloody pink against the brilliance behind them. Part of me wondered if this was going on all over the building; the rest just wanted to know how much of it I could take before I went blind.

  My hand slipped off the power button and I let it. Instead, I reached along the case. I could feel it shuddering, bucking under my hand. Inside, the grinding of the hard drive provided an ominous counterpoint for the scream of the fan. I got a faint whiff of the burnt peanut butter smell that always accompanies a computer flame out, and that spurred me on to panic. Blinded, in a room full of burning computers? No thank you.

  The back of the system was unpainted metal, not plastic or enameled aluminum, and it was hot to the touch. I jerked my fingers away, burned, but quickly shoved them back, my hand splayed against the machine as I looked for what I needed.

  It was there, right where it was supposed to be: the power cord. “When in doubt,” I whispered, “pull the goddamned plug.”

  I pulled. It came out easily, the half-melted plastic painfully hot under my fingers. I let it drop to the floor, somehow heard it hit, and realized that I’d been able to hear it because everything else had stopped.

  Cautiously, I opened my eyes. Black spots the size of dinner plates swam in front of them, masking the deeper darkness that I hoped was just the usual gloom of the room. It was silent, silent and dark, and there I was on the floor under Terry’s desk.

  “Well, goddamn.” A little later, I added, “What the hell?” and made a game effort to stand up.

  And promptly banged my head on the underside of the desk, causing me to drop to the floor like I’d been shot. I lay there for a moment, breathing in plasticky fumes and laughing because I was still alive.

  It took me a solid three minutes before the last snickers were out of my system. With my unburned hand, I grabbed my phone, which had fallen as I’d fallen down. I made my standard, reflexive check for messages, or tried to. Once again, all the power was gone.

  “All the pictures, too, I’ll bet,” I told myself with a groan, and rolled left before heaving myself to my feet. Dead phone meant a couple of things, but the most immediate was that whoever might be calling me—like, say, the woman who’d heard an agonized shriek from my phone just before it cut off—would be getting the sort of voicemail message that said “dead phone.” And since dead phone was in this case equivalent to suddenly dead phone, I figured I could expect either Michelle and Leon riding to the rescue or the cops, and I really wasn’t up to either.

  My eyes still smarting from the beating they’d taken, I stumbled over to one of the nearby desks and picked up one of the room’s few desktop phones. I thought about calling Michelle to tell her not to worry, but for one thing, I wasn’t sure that she shouldn’t. For another, I could no longer remember her number without the cell phone there to provide it for me.

  Instead, I called home. The phone rang six times before the answering machine picked up. “Hi, this is Ryan and Sarah,” I heard my voice saying as the recording kicked in. “We can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave something pertinent at the tone, we’ll try to get back to you as soon as we can.”

  I racked my brain for a moment to try to come up with something amusing to say, or at least pertinent, but nothing came to mind besides the realization of how painfully cheesy the greeting was. It would have to be changed, I decided, as recognition came that the recording had beeped and was waiting for my message.”

  “Hey honey, I’m fine. I’m at the office. I’ll be home soon.” There was nothing else to say, really, so I hung up. My cell phone was still dead, so I stuck it in my pocket and made my way out of the building and onto the front steps. The concrete was colder than I expected, but I sat and waited anyway. Sitting in the car would have provided too much temptation to drive away and go home.

  It took fifteen minutes for the headlights of Michelle’s car to appear, followed shortly by the rest of it. That was five more than I’d anticipated, f
ive fewer than driving anywhere near the legal speed limit would have allowed. She parked, skewed across three spaces, and hopped out before the glare from the headlights had died completely.

  “What the hell happened?” she demanded as she stomped over to where I sat. “One minute we’re talking, and the next—”

  “I know,” I interrupted her. “I was there. Where’s Leon?”

  “In the car. You still haven’t answered my question.” And lo and behold, there was Leon shifting himself out of the passenger door, moving a good deal slower than Michelle had.

  I glanced over in his direction, and he threw me a gesture that could only be interpreted as “What?” I threw him a wave, and then turned my attention back to Shelly. “What happened? I don’t know. Hell, your guess is as good as mine.”

  For that, I got a grim little smile. “Funny, here I was thinking that the only way my guess would be as good as yours would be if I had been there when everything went nuts, which I wasn’t. You, however, were, which means that not only is your guess better than mine, but you can probably actually tell me some of the details, which I would dearly love to know. Now, are you going to tell me, or should I just beat them out of you?”

  “She’ll do it, too, man,” Leon added, having ambled over close enough to catch the back end of Michelle’s explosion. “Besides, I want to know what happened to my cameras. Those things were not cheap.”

  “Here,” I said, and pulled the one I’d salvaged out of my pocket. I tossed it to him, and he caught it reflexively.

  “Oh, man!” His face papered itself over with dismay. “No way I can salvage this. There’s no way!”

  “Take a look at the cord.” I could sense Michelle getting ready to erupt at being ignored and briefly enjoyed the sensation before looking at her. “As for what happened, you know most of it.”

  Her stance relaxed a bit but not the look on her face. “Try me.”

  “I turned Terry’s machine on. When it finally booted, it went nuts, and the monitor shot out white light like a searchlight. Every other system in the room went just as crazy until I pulled the plug on Terry’s.”

  “And then they all stopped?” Leon didn’t sound convinced. “There’s no way that unplugging one should have affected the others.”

  “That’s your issue with this?” I asked, my voice on the ragged edge of incredulity. “There’s no way any of this should have happened. Honest to God, I’m not sure how much of it actually did happen, and how much was just me breathing in weird plastic fumes. But you know what? Right now, I don’t care. I just want to go home”—I looked at Michelle—“to Sarah and forget about this until morning. And no, I’m not going to check email or do a damn other thing online until then.”

  I stood and took a step toward my car. Michelle moved to block me. “What about Terry?” she asked. “Shouldn’t we make sure that he’s all right?”

  “His car’s not here, and neither is he,” I said irritably. “If you want to go by his place to make sure he’s still alive, you can do it. But my money says he went home. Which is what I’m going to do.”

  “Are you sure you’re OK to drive?” Michelle asked, a hint of concern getting lost and accidentally wandering into her voice. “I mean, what you described sounds pretty screwed up.”

  “I’m fine.” A pause. “Thank you.” She stepped aside.

  “Come on, man,” Leon said. “You can’t just leave it here.”

  I thought about what we’d seen over the webcam. About the melted cables and that pure white light. I thought about what I’d seen, and what possible explanations there could be for it, and what might happen if I kept poking. Then, I turned to Leon. “Tonight,” I said, “I can,” and walked past him.

  “You’re chickening out,” he called after me. “This is too screwed up to let go.”

  “Maybe it’s too screwed up to keep poking at tonight,” I called back without turning around. “Look, you guys do what you want. Me, I’ve seen enough for one night. Whatever it is in there, I’m leaving it alone until morning because,” and I stopped, and I turned back to face them. “Because I am afraid. Maybe I could have died in there. Maybe I could have gone blind. Maybe whatever we think we saw Terry getting close to could have popped out of his machine again and eaten my brain. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going back in there, and I’m not going anywhere near Terry or a computer until I’ve had a chance to think about this crap logically and tamp down the heebie-jeebies to a dull roar. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said Michelle. “Get some sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow.” Another pause. “Say hi to Sarah for me.”

  “Yeah,” Leon added awkwardly. “Come see me when you get in, OK? We’ll figure something out.”

  “I’ll try,” I said softly, and got into my car. The two of them watched me drive off. Neither of them said anything else, and I was reasonably certain they weren’t holding hands.

  The drive home took exactly as long as it should. I didn’t speed, nor did I drive unnecessarily slowly to baby my still-recovering eyes. Sarah had left the outside light on for me, but the interior was dark. I left it that way, shrugging out of my clothes and into bed. Sarah was there, of course, already asleep.

  “Mmm?” she asked as I curled up next to her.

  “Shh,” I said, and kissed the back of her neck. “Go back to sleep.”

  She yawned. “You’re shaking. Are you cold?”

  I put an arm around her. She pulled it close. “Parts of me are,” I told her. “Parts of me. That’s all.”

  Chapter 17

  “Hey.”

  I was fairly sure that was Sarah’s voice, but until I was sure, I didn’t want to commit to anything as permanent as opening my eyes. Instead, I made a noise that probably came out as “manurmble”, turned over, and tried to bury my face in my pillow.

  “Ryan. Hey there. Wake up.”

  It was definitely Sarah. It was also definitely too early in the morning for her to be trying to wake me up, according to my never-yet-proven-wrong internal clock. I simultaneously pulled the blanket up over the top of my head and tried to stay as motionless as I imagined a sleeping body would, muttering “Lemme ‘lone” as I did so.

  Sarah seemed unimpressed and pinched my foot through the comforter as evidence. “Come on, Ryan. It’s time to get up.” She sounded mildly irritated, which could go one of two ways. Either she’d get more agitated the longer it took me to get out of bed, in which case it behooved me to get up now and answer her, or she’d get more agitated the longer it took me to get out of bed, in which case I should just stay under the covers until her annoyance reached a sufficient level for her to give up and wander off.

  While I thought of that, she pinched me again. Hard.

  “Ow.” Clearly, strategy number 2 had outlived its usefulness. I threw off the covers and sat more or less up, tucking my feet up under me as I did so. “Good morning. What was that for?”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah said. “Why don’t you tell me?” She was, I saw as I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, standing fully dressed at the foot of our bed. One corner of her mouth was turned down in what could only be called a practice frown.

  A yawn made a mad dash for freedom from my innards. I fought its escape for a minute, then gave up, treating Sarah to what had to be an unpleasant view of my unbrushed teeth and tonsils in all their glory. “You’re not going to believe me, honey,” I said when I had control of my facial muscles back, “but I didn’t do anything.” Last night’s memories came flooding back, and I shook my head to clear it. “Nothing bad, anyway.”

  Something of the sheer strangeness of the evening’s encounters must have made its way into my voice, because instead of debating with me, Sarah sat down on the bed. “What happened? You didn’t come home until late.” A pause. “Really late.” Another pause. “You were at the office, right? I mean, you never said, but I assumed….”

  And there it was, the real question. The problem was, I had no idea what I could tell her wi
thout sounding like I was either lying or completely insane.

  I thought about it for a minute and picked insane.

  “I was at the office for a little while,” I said, doing my best to keep my voice level. “Mostly, though, I was at Leon’s. We were, ah, hell, are you sure you want to hear this?”

  She settled in, smoothing the comforter next to where she sat. “Yeah. I think I do, because you sound a little freaked out right now. Let me hear it, and then I’ll decide whether to be mad at you for staying so late or worried that you and Leon did something stupid, all right?”

  “I’m more worried about you thinking I should be committed,” I told her quietly. “Let me think of how to say this, because you’re not going to believe a word of it.”

  “Start with ‘I was thinking of my beautiful girlfriend,’ and I’ll believe that much.”

  I chuckled. “Believe it or not, I was, and not just because Michelle looked like she was snuggling up to Leon.”

  Sarah straightened up like she’d been shocked. “What? Those two? What the hell is he thinking?”

  “That his wrist is hurting? I have no idea.” I shrugged, trying for casual. “As long as she’s looking at someone else, I’m happy.”

  That brought Sarah back down in a hurry. “I guess. I’m still not crazy about you spending all night with her over at Leon’s.”

  “With Leon,” I pointed out. “Trust me, honey. There’s nothing to worry about there. And all this is beside the point. We were at Leon’s because of that thing I’d mentioned the other day. He’d rigged up cameras at the office. We…I thought….” I tried to figure out how to explain what came next without sounding like a paranoid dickweed.

  “You thought what?” Sarah was no longer patting the bed next to her in invitation, I noticed.

  I let it out all at once. “You remember Terry? Skinny guy, bad hair, no social skills?” She nodded minimally. “Terry’s been acting weird, and we thought that if we figured out why he was acting strange, we could help him out.” She started to tell me this was a dumb idea, and I held up my hand to forestall it.