Dark Application: TWO

by Brian Krogstad

  Confusion crossed her as she squinted at the twisted image of the figures on the screen. She saw two heads and four legs, and then two legs… the clip was on a loop and it started over. Two heads, a face. Two people kissing. She saw the slope of the back and recognized Sean’s shoulders, bending over another person who was lying back on the desk. The four legs became two when… when the other two were thrust up over his shoulders. She stared in disbelief, and her eyes grew wide. She was watching Sean having rough hot sex in the office.

  Having sex with Leah.

  ***

  The granite floors were shiny and the officers’ boots squeaked when they shifted their feet. Luke allowed himself to be led, straight-backed and stiff-lipped, to the prisoner’s dock. He gazed unwillingly on the Judge who sat on the opposite side of the room in a black robe. Officers stood around the room with their thumbs in the loops of their belts or draped over their pistols. The lawyers shuffled their papers and sipped ice water.

  The gallery seats were sparse, despite the mob of reporters and television cameras posted just outside the courthouse doors. The parents or family members of the dead students populated the rows, but there were still a surprising amount of vacant seats. Some were couples. Others looked random and unidentifiable. All were solemn and baleful. A dainty black woman in a regal gray pant suit glared at him through thin-framed glasses. His eyes flitted past her but held her in his mind’s eye.

  One couple sat aloof, dressed in dark clothing. The woman fanned her face with a ringed hand that glittered. Her hair was veiled by a black and purple headdress. Gold and jeweled bracelets adorned her wrists, and the man she sat with wore an unbuttoned black blazer with no tie. His large brown nose was red from being wiped, and every few minutes he raised a tissue to his face.

  The prosecuting attorney stood, and once the lawyer opened his mouth to present the charges, Luke’s mind went blank. He stared through eyes that didn’t see. His ears swam as a hypnotic feeling came over him, trance-like, and a soft buzzing, like hot wires in water, reverberated through his ears. He could feel his legs slowly go numb, and the voices before him became softer and more distant. The veins in his throat throbbed so hard he felt like they might choke him. The sounds of murmuring and shuffling around him were distant and strange, as though his mind was disconnected from his body, and he had a queer feeling that he was watching something happening to someone else, as though he wasn’t really there. It vaguely occurred to him that he was being stared at, but all he could sense was the electric buzzing, the zap and sizzle that contorted his thoughts, that made him feel like he was far under water, the pressure crushing his head.

  The defense stood at some point, and how much time had passed, Luke was unsure. The lawyer, whom he had just met earlier that week, strutted and flexed as he presented the only straggling chances of hope that Luke had to pursue his plea of not guilty.

  “In this country, a man is not found guilty until there is sufficient evidence to prove it, he said, stalking theatrically like a dufus in Luke’s eyes up and down the aisle. “The phone that was used in the crime against Brafferton Community College has not been located. How, with a conscious mind, can any person in this room accuse him without evidence? Until the murder weapon has been located and identified, there is no evidence to support the claim that Jeffers himself was the initiator of the text that caused the explosion. We still have not ruled out accident. Ownership of the weapon, as we all well know, does not indicate ownership of the crime. If Jeffers was an accessory to a crime committed by another, then we may be wasting our time in this courtroom as we speak.”

  Murmurs spread across the room. The regal woman glanced his way, and he forced himself to hold her gaze. They locked eyes for a moment, but in that moment, a shared sorrow, deep and sharp, passed between them. She dropped her eyes first.

  The hearing concluded with a full minute of the sound of shuffling papers. Each attorney jotted notes, gathered stacks, organized and re-organized. When the Judge spoke, his voice was tired and his forehead creased heavily.

  “Court is adjourned for two weeks. Defense, please organize your case and come ready to enter a plea. Preliminary hearing will resume at nine am two weeks from now.”

  As the gathered began to rise and exit through the tall oak double doors, the woman with the gold bracelets caught his eye. She gazed ruefully at him a moment, her dark eyes peering from between the folds of her hijab.

  The stares of the grieving mothers were relieved by the chaotic throng of the press when he stepped, still cuffed and escorted by armed officers, into the sweltering hallway. Flashes blinded him and the room was an echoing blast of clicks and shoving, elbowing reporters who smelled like dirty armpits and waved long-handled foam microphones in his face. The officers with him, who in jail treated him lower than a stray dog, held the press back protectively from him, exercising their power, demonstrating their authority with loud shouts and hands on their weapons.

  Luke allowed his face to be photographed as he was pushed by the top of the head into the car like livestock, and made sure that every moment any person was photographing him, he had a look of serene benevolence and determination.

  CHAPTER SIX: Leah

  Sean’s presence behind her made her shake with anger as she poured a boiling hot cup of coffee. He was slinking around the kitchen, after attempting an impotent yet well-meaning apology for his behavior, but his acknowledgement of it only made her angrier. Irritable since she’d woken at 4:30 that morning, she huffed around the kitchen, clanking measuring cups and slamming cupboard doors. The Bluetooth was clipped snugly around her ear, and the early morning customers were filing in. The croissants and the muffins were steaming, the coffee was fresh. Yet Sabrina was unsettled, and Sean was startled at her temperamental vibe. It had been two days since their date.

  “You need to take that thing off your head,” he said, gesturing toward the device. She stopped cold, turning her eyes angrily at him. A wave of rage went through her and he grasped her demeanor. She was surprised by her own gall, but she knew she would not remove the Bluetooth. For a horrifying moment, she had the urge to throw the hot coffee in his face. She had a clear picture in her mind of the boiling liquid splashing his face, and him crying out in agony. The vision was dispelled by the loud cackling laugh of Leah and a customer as she slid the register drawer closed with a bang. The customer was a regular customer, the short man with pale skin and a large broken-looking nose. His squinty eyes flickered over Sabrina and then quickly away again.

  Sabrina simply turned away, ignoring him, and went back to her drink.

  Sean was insulted by her dismissal; she was infuriated by his demands. It seemed strange to her to be kissing and touching outside of work, but then having to listen to him order her around at work.

  I was drunk, he’d said. Sabrina scoffed. Feeble, juvenile excuse. Were you and Leah drunk in the office then?

  Leah fluttered around, busily working the cash register. She stole curious glances at Sabrina and Sean. Sabrina ignored them all.

  The phone was engaged in placing drink orders. Sabrina obeyed the soft clicky voice in her ear without question, and it was invariably right. She had begun to worry about losing the phone now, wondering if the app was only a temporary gift, and stressing over what she would do if one day it stopped working, or if it stopped being right all the time. Sean now posed a good escape for her; she could say that dating her manager had created a moral conflict in the workplace, and she could quit. The worst that could happen is that without the phone she could revert back to the slow clumsy barista she had been, although now she had memorized the drink menu and she had developed a systemized way of operating that would prevent her from being that slow.

  But the phone had added something frightening and interesting today. The feminine, artificial voice had interrupted her work with a bizarre statement. Go to school, Sabrina. The hairs on Sabrina’s neck stood on end. Chocolate swirl whip, large. She faltered a moment, wondering if she
had just imagined that, and waited to see if it would repeat. It didn’t.

  But Sabrina had a thorn in her side today. The image of Sean and Leah, blurry and gray, her ankles around his neck, his hands shoved under her skirt… Things began to make sense, the flirtatious looks, the way he held a hand on her lower back when he talked to her, the looks she had given Sabrina when he had taken an interest in her, too. Sean was womanizing his employees.

  She ripped the small refrigerator open and grabbed the milk. She jostled the cups as she grabbed for one, her movements jerky, finding it harder and harder to hide her wrath. She worked her jaw, the muscles in her temples standing out and giving her face a hard edge. Sean was frowning at her when she twisted the lid back on the milk.

  “I need to leave early for school today,” Sabrina said, not looking at him, not offering an excuse.

  Sean sighed and crossed his arms. “Okay,” he said. He watched as she made the last chocolate whip, hung her apron on the hook, and filled in her time card. She exited through the employee exit into the side alleyway. She didn’t look back, only stormed to her car.

  She drove to school and parked in the student parking lot, which was still empty. The sun had not come up but the sky was light blue. Summer was going to end soon but the warmth would last another few months. The rising sun glancing off the tops of the trees caste deep shadows, the light a bright orange, making the trees look like they were on fire.

  She decisively locked the doors while sitting in her car alone. Since that night alone at her house, when that person had broken in and attacked her, she felt a sense of vigilance and fear and she obsessively checked the screen of the smartphone. Her gaze flitted from the rear view mirror to the windows and back again. The parking lot was desolate. Birds chirped and a light breeze ruffled the tops of the trees. She sensed the serenity of the morning, and allowed herself to relax. She took a deep breath, holding it a second, and let it out, dropping her shoulders and stretching her neck side to side. The birds were bouncing along under her car, pecking at the ground, dancing around each other. The Bluetooth was silent in her ear. She removed it and tucked it into her jacket pocket. She studied Luke Jeffers’ phone in her hand, turning it over, peering into the camera lens.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the birds scatter and flit away. Alert, she jerked her head around to see what had chased them off. She strained her neck around, eyes bulging, and her breath picked up in her chest. Suddenly aware of her isolation, she fumbled for her keys and clumsily dropped them on the floor by her feet. She ducked and frantically reached for them, and her fingertips grazed them, pushing them farther out of reach. She sat up quickly and pushed the seat back, and then reached down and grabbed the keys in her shaking hand. Her heart was racing. She put the keys in and started the engine.

  There was no sign of another car in the lot. It was still too early for teachers or other students to arrive. She had no idea, really, why she was even sitting here. She’d had to get out of The Drip that morning, but why, she was unsure. Certainly, she’d been having a bad day, and the incident with Sean was still a fresh slice in her self-confidence, but she had pushed through worse days than that without leaving early. It had been the prompting of the phone that had pressed her to leave.

  But the phone had not said to leave work, it had said to go to school. So here she was, confused, with no other communication from the phone since. Was she here too early, putting herself in danger unknowingly? Was she supposed to be here right now? Who did she think she was listening to?

  Fear and uncertainty gripped her. She had a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach. She looked at the clock and saw that both she and Leah would have been leaving work right now, but now it would only be Leah leaving, walking down the dark alley with the high buildings on each side to get to the small parking lot in the rear where they parked, usually on opposite sides when possible, even when theirs were the only cars there.

  She drove once around the parking lot, looking down the streets for parked cars, particularly the Mercedes. There was no one. Then a car did appear down the street, coming toward the school and pulling in with a swift lurch. It was the small red Subaru station wagon of the science teacher, Mr. Williams. She exhaled, unaware she’d been holding her breath, and parked again. For the rest of the day, the choppy computerized voice echoed in her mind:

  Go to school, Sabrina.

  ***

  Doug and Kevin sat at one side of the large oak dinner table, Sabrina and Gabriela on the other. A picture of Kevin’s mother, Esther, who had died when he was a baby, hung on the wall separating the kitchen from the corridor. It wasn’t until he met Gabriela on a business trip to Oaxaca that he had remarried and had Sabrina.

  Sabrina and Kevin had whined bitterly about dinners at the table as children, but now, as either adult or hedging on one, the comfort and familiarity had a cheery quality that made them all feel very close. They would frequently switch back and forth from English to Spanish, almost unconsciously, to make sure Mom was in on the conversation, although she normally listened and didn’t talk much anyway.

  “So how is kickboxing going, Bean? You’re looking mighty fit,” said Kevin, shoveling mashed potatoes in his mouth. Gabriela made it with the skins on, with roasted garlic and sour cream, just how he loved it. The salad had spicy dandelion and arugula, and the soup was full of chiles, onions, and radishes. Gabriela had even learned to bake a chewy challah for Doug in honor of Kevin’s mother, although the traditional use of the bread had long ago fizzled in the family, and she sprinkled it with poppy seeds and butter in the Mexican style.

  Sabrina nodded and in between bites, told him about her progress, her performance improvements, and her five-mile run time. Kevin was a long-since retired track runner, and he looked nostalgic and envious of her.

  Soon the conversation turned to her college plans, which had been horribly thwarted by the fact that she could no longer attend Brafferton, by her father’s harsh restriction. She had believed that she would be able to spend an extra two years at home if she did Junior college and then transferred. But now those plans were replaced by the daunting reality that she was going to have to move into a dormitory six hundred miles away. She argued with him, saying that it wasn’t as though it was going to happen again, but he insisted that there was something bizarre going on at that school, with the deaths prior to the explosion, too.

  “I can’t leave Mom here, and just go away,” she said, looking down into her soup. Gabriela fixed her gaze on her daughter and listened to the English that she hardly understood. “She needs me.”

  Doug and Kevin passed looks. “Bean, your mother is going to be just fine,” he said. “She’s a big girl. A parent’s job is to take care of their kids, not the other way around. You can’t avoid going away to college to take care of Mom. Where’s the logic in that? Besides, I’m here.”

  Sabrina nodded slowly. “I got accepted into Brown,” she finally said.

  Kevin and Doug looked impressed. Doug laughed and reached across the table to ruffle her hair. “That’s fantastic news, Bean!” he exclaimed. She smiled broadly, looking humbly down into her salad.

  “So Kev, how’s that project going?” Doug asked.

  Kevin shook his head. “Stressful,” he said. “Too many politics, too much glitchy

  equipment. I’ve decided not to try to publish my dissertation since the whole project is so

  secretive. They want me to submit copies for approval from the CIA and honestly, I would rather

  not have to go there.”

  They began to discuss the project in computer science jargon and Sabrina followed, not

  chewing too loud, afraid she’d miss a word.

  “The software needs continuous updating and fixing. Sometimes I think I have it under

  control, but then there’s another unexpected reaction, like it’s… well, like it’s evolving as I’m

  developing it,” said Kevin.

  Doug looked puzzled. “I
know you’re not supposed to talk about it, but I am interested in

  knowing more about the software. Any extra information you could give me would help, and

  who knows. Maybe Pop still makes a good programmer in his old age.”

  “Well, I’m programming on a dev server in a test environment. It’s completely isolated

  from previous versions, the Internet or any live programs, aside from dev tools of course,” Kevin

  replied. “But, all of the sudden, corrupt code or random errors will just appear out of nowhere.

  Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t true errors that impact the functionality, they’re just random

  pieces of code for functions that I’ve already coded out of the program.”

  “Wait a minute,” Doug interrupted, “you’ve commented out snippets of code and they’re still functional?”

  “Oh, it’s way more complicated than that,” Kevin said. “Code and functions that

  have been completely removed… like, randomly reappear in the new program. It’s almost like

  the program remembers everything that I add and decides on its own that certain pieces should

  remain, or be added back into the program, even after I’ve deleted or removed them.”

  “Wow, Kev, that sounds like some crazy AI shit,” said Doug. “As terrible as it is to have to start from scratch, especially this far into it, it sounds like you have to clean room the whole project.”

  “That’s the scary part, Dad. I have – twice,” Kevin replied. “At this point, I’ve already

  told you too much and I’m so burnt out on this whole thing right now. Can we talk about

  something else?” asked Kevin.