“Probably not,” Tess said. “They probably took it when he…after he was gone.”
“They might not have,” Magpie said. “They locked up the whole place—they may not have bothered taking the computer out.”
“But it’s locked by a security keypad, and we don’t have the code, not anymore,” said Ben.
“We can open a window,” said Magpie brightly.
“Not necessary. Keypads are easy to crack,” said Terry.
“Besides, even if Twitterpat’s machine is still there, it’s probably password-protected—and they probably made sure that the rest of the computers aren’t…,” began Ben, who obviously thought the whole thing was a really bad idea.
“You can always use my laptop,” said Terry. “But now that you mention it…I think I’d still like to take a look at the network in the computer lab. They took the library computers off, but the computer lab ones might still be okay. And I can be there to watch your back.”
“No,” Thea said, “you’re coming with me to my parents’. If I just pop in babbling about this, they won’t take me seriously. Tess and Ben and Magpie will have to stand guard in the lab.”
“Tonight?”
“Now,” Thea said. “I may not have until tonight. They’ll figure this one out fast, if they haven’t already.”
Terry was already on his feet. “We’ll need the laptop to get inside,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ll get it. Meet you outside the lab.”
Computer classes had been suspended since Twitterpat’s death, and the computer lab had been declared out of bounds, but it had not occurred to the school authorities that anyone would go so far as to circumvent that ban. The lab was deliberately isolated; no other regular classes were scheduled in that corridor, but it was not guarded, other than by the keypad lock. Terry detailed Ben and Magpie to stand guard at either end of the corridor outside the computer lab and, his laptop open on his knee, calmly hacked the code for the lock. Ben’s head snapped around at the sound of the door opening, and then he abandoned his post, trotting back to Terry’s side, shaking his head.
“Remind me not to make you mad at me,” he muttered at Terry as he slipped past into the dark and silent computer room.
Terry merely smiled and cast a last look up and down the corridor before clicking the door shut behind him.
“That was easy enough,” he said to the others, “but it may well have triggered an alarm somewhere. We may not have all that much time. Thea, is the laptop all right, or would you rather fire up one of the desktops?”
“I’d rather not leave anything on those machines,” Thea said.
Terry pushed the laptop over to her. “Go for it.”
“Tess,” Terry said as Thea began typing furiously at the laptop’s keyboard, “stay on the door. If you hear anything…yank us back. Fast.”
“How?” Tess said, staring at the computers. “Don’t look at me like that, the last time I was in there with you…”
“Just hit ESCAPE,” Thea said without taking her eyes off the screen.
“And hit DELETE the moment you see us return,” Terry added. “I’ll deal with erasing the whole thing properly later, but I don’t want it on-screen if anyone blunders in here.”
“Okay,” said Ben, straddling a chair beside Thea’s, leaning his crossed arms across the back of the chair and resting his chin on them. He had not been happy with this whole idea, but he was someone who could be trusted to deal with any emergency.
Thea paused for a moment, looking over the few terse sentences she had typed in. She had not bothered to make her passage grammatical or even coherent—just fragments of sentences, glimpses of details, woven into one perfect image of home. Not just the reddish cedar wood of her father’s bookshelves and the usual desk accessory of Paul’s favorite mug half full of cold and forgotten coffee, but also the soft, worn, chocolate-brown leather of the two small armchairs on the patterned burgundy rug, the musty smell of books, a faint cinnamon smell of concentration, and the lemon-zest whiff given off by active electronics, the familiar softness of the upholstered computer chair. Thea had put her aunt Zoë in that chair first, and then smartly backspaced until she erased her aunt’s name, putting in her father’s instead, then erased that and put Zoë back in. She wasn’t certain—she wanted her father, but she wanted the buffer of her aunt’s presence, too—but she did not have the luxury of spending too much time on this. She hesitated and then reached a hand out behind her, without turning around.
“Terry.”
“Ready,” Terry said instantly, slipping his hand over hers.
Their fingers touched, and the computer lab winked out.
2.
TERRY BLINKED, HIS FINGERS curled around Thea’s hand, staring at his new surroundings. Paul’s study was perfectly rendered, but it was empty.
“Damn,” Thea muttered.
“Is something wrong?” Terry said.
“Yeah. No…just wait a moment. Damn, I knew I should have made up my mind before I…”
The study door began to open even as Thea spoke. Aunt Zoë stuck her head into the room, glancing around, and then froze as she noticed Thea and Terry in the middle of the room. She threw a quick, careful glance behind her and stepped into the room, closing the door behind her.
“Thea?” Zoë asked incredulously.
“Is Dad here?” Thea asked.
Zoë nodded her chin toward the closed door. “I just called him. What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know what’s going on, but something is happening and I’m not sure what to do. All I know is that it wasn’t me, but they’ll never…”
“Thea,” Zoë said, “you’re babbling. What’s the matter?”
“Spellspam,” Thea said.
“What?”
“Spellspam,” Thea enunciated. “Tell Daddy to check his e-mail. And tell him to be careful….”
The door opened again, admitting Paul Winthrop into his sanctum. “It’s a fine thing,” he was muttering, “when you’re summoned to your own study by…Thea…? What are you doing here? Who’s your friend?”
“Sorry, Paul,” Zoë said, glancing at him. “It just felt…strange in here. I thought something smelled dangerous.”
“I’m Terry Dane, sir,” Terry said. “I think we’re in trouble. We can’t stay long, but something happened…. Thea will explain.”
Paul and Zoë listened without interruption to Thea’s account of the events in the library, but when she had finished, Paul shook his head.
“Can’t be done,” he said. “It can’t be done. Let me see….”
He crossed the room and slipped into his computer chair, tapping on his keyboard. Even as he began typing, Zoë suddenly subsided into one of the armchairs.
“Oh, boy,” she said softly.
Paul turned his head marginally, his hands hovering above the keyboard. “What, Zoë?”
“I thought it was just some sort of bizarre coincidence, but now…”
“What, Zoë?” Paul said, swiveling in his chair to stare at his sister-in-law, who had gone very white.
“There was an e-mail,” Zoë said, “that I got a couple of weeks ago—and deleted, because it was spam. It offered me ‘a free gift,’ just for looking at the message. Well, I thought I had deleted it, without looking at the message, but obviously they meant it literally. And I just got this weird thing…”
“What?”
“Well…a gift subscription. To a Chinese magazine. In Mandarin. I got my first two issues yesterday. I thought someone was playing a prank on me. I never connected it to the e-mail, not until now. But what if…”
There was an awful silence. “I’ll look into it,” Paul said, his voice very low. His hands had dropped from the keyboard and were gripping the arms of his computer chair, hard. “Even so—it shouldn’t have touched the Academy—”
“The students can access webmail on the school network,” Zoë said. “That’s an open forum, it’s not like a dedicated e-mail program�
��webmail is nearly impossible to set up filters for, impossible to regulate—anything that pops into your inbox just sits there, ready to make mischief. And it looks as if that might be more than enough. The Academy might have done better to have allowed e-mail contact with the students’ own accounts and software, if they allowed it at all. This way, there’s no control over any of it.”
“This would probably be the worst possible moment for Patrick Wittering not to be in charge,” Paul muttered.
“What should I…,” Thea began, and then flinched, startled, looking behind her.
“Yes,” Terry said, “I felt it. There must be someone coming. We have to go.”
“Thea, be careful,” Paul began, even as his daughter winked out of his study and thin air closed behind her. “Tell Principal Harris that I will send help—”
His voice broke off, as though a door had been slammed on him.
“What is it?” demanded Terry, turning to his laptop as he and Thea found themselves back in the computer lab.
“Sorry,” Tess said. “I thought there was someone coming. I told Ben to call you back.”
Ben was pushing back from the computer even as she spoke, looking sheepish. “Sorry,” he said. “You said to hit DELETE.”
“Okay. It’s okay. Let me just get rid of this….”
“It was weird to watch it from the outside,” Magpie said. “You were kind of…there, but see-through.”
“Transparent.” Tess giggled, suddenly light-headed. “Like LaTasha’s skin.”
“That’s not funny,” Thea said, the only one of them who had actually seen the results of that particular spellspam. “I wonder how she’s doing—I should have gone to see her.”
“You were so intent on doing this,” Magpie said. “Are you sure she’s even in sickbay?”
“They can’t exactly let her run around like that, not looking like…”
“Terry,” Tess said softly, ignoring the other girls.
“That’s done. They won’t find a trace of it on the hard drive,” Terry said, looking up from the laptop. “What, Tess?”
“Look. The office.”
The room that had been Patrick Wittering’s office led off the computer lab, and its door had been left ajar. Thea glimpsed a desk, now clear of Twitterpat’s usual untidy mound of paperwork…but still bearing a computer monitor.
Terry and Tess exchanged a swift glance.
“Might not mean the computer is still there,” Terry murmured.
“Why would they take the computer and leave the monitor behind?”
“You think it’s worth it?”
“What on earth are you hoping to find?” Ben demanded.
“Answers, maybe,” Terry said. But still he hung back, hesitating.
“Terry,” Magpie said in her most practical voice, “when Twitterpat left, none of this computer stuff was even a question. What kind of answers could you hope to find?”
“They wouldn’t have sent an unarmed man to fight the Nothing,” Tess said.
“And he was good, he was really good,” said Terry. “If anyone knew what was going on, he would have. The man lived half a step into the future.”
“And you really think he would have left it all just lying around like this…? Or that the school would have allowed it?” Ben said.
“Anything could happen,” Terry said. “But I wish I felt less like a cat burglar.”
“He might have wanted you to know,” Tess said. “Someone else might need to know.”
“Cracking the door code was one thing,” Magpie said. “What makes you think you could crack Twitterpat’s computer?”
“And Terry”—Thea had subsided into one of the chairs and was now staring up at Terry—“if you thought he might have rigged the door, what might he have done to booby-trap the computer?”
“There are ways,” Terry said. “There are always ways. Look, nobody else might have known where to look….”
“Like for instance in a computer left sitting in the middle of an empty office?” Ben said, a little sharply. “Don’t you think it’s far more likely that, if they left that computer dumped there like that, there might have been nothing of value on it for anyone to find?”
“Ben,” Terry said, “I’m probably better than anyone else they have on staff right now. They haven’t even made an attempt to replace Twitterpat. Everyone else still treats computers as no more than glorified electronic filing cabinets. But now there’s Thea…and then this new thing….” He paused. There were things that he could not utter. “What you called it, back in your father’s study,” he said, glancing at Thea.
“Spellspam,” Thea said, shrugging. “It was the first thing that came to mind.”
Magpie giggled. “Spellspam. Thea, that’s brilliant.”
“What did your parents say?” Ben asked.
“My aunt thinks she might have received one of them herself,” Thea said. “My dad said he’d check it out.”
“What if it’s worse than we thought?” Terry said. “One might be a joke—two, a coincidence—but what if we just haven’t heard of any more as yet, isolated out here as we are? What if this was just the first symptom in a full-scale cyber-epidemic? I don’t think they have the first idea about how to deal with something like that.”
“They dealt with it when the libraries went feral,” Thea said. “Spells escaped from grimoires in the stacks and everything suddenly turned to mush and chaos. I know the stories—my father used to do that for a living.”
Terry shot a desperate look at Tess, unable to articulate what he was thinking—the conversation was straying into what were, for him, dangerous waters. Tess thought for a moment, and then began speaking, keeping her eyes on her brother’s face.
“Feral libraries were localized,” Tess said. “They could isolate the afflicted buildings, shut everything down, shield it all tightly, and then deal with it at their leisure. This is something else altogether. They have no concept of what cyberspace really is. If they think the old methods are going to work, they are going to find themselves making a bad situation worse. You can’t just constrain a rampant piece of, well, of spellspam if you like, not in the same way that they could shut the doors on a stray spell in the library stacks.”
“Trouble,” said Thea and Magpie, in unison.
“Trouble,” agreed Terry.
“But you’re missing something,” Tess said slowly.
They all turned toward her expectantly.
“Thea, you can do this thing with the computers,” Tess said. “It’s new. It’s unique. But we all know you didn’t do this.” She paused, swallowed hard. “Thea…you are not alone. At least one other person has figured out how to make computers do magic on command. The answers may not be in Twitterpat’s computer—you might be the only one who can figure out how to stop this. From the inside, somehow.”
There was a moment of appalled silence as everyone tried to absorb this, and then Thea shook her head violently.
“But I can’t do this. I have no idea what’s happening, or how it’s happening. It isn’t the same thing at all.”
“You might have no choice except to try to find out,” Tess said.
“I may be putting my neck in a noose for nothing,” Terry said abruptly, “but I’m here, and Twitterpat’s computer is still here. I might as well try. If you guys don’t want to get in trouble…it’s my own funeral.”
“You had my back,” Thea said, without missing a beat. “I’ll watch yours.”
“You’re all insane!” Ben wailed, but made no move to leave.
Magpie merely stood there grinning.
Tess squared her shoulders and tossed back her hair.
“All right then,” Terry said softly.
It had been a while since anybody had been in the office. The door squeaked softly as Terry pushed it all the way open, and their footsteps seemed oddly quiet and muffled.
Twitterpat’s computer was on the floor under his desk. Someone had thought to put a pl
astic cover on the monitor and the keyboard, but the computer tower itself was furred with a thick layer of dust.
“Will it even start up?” Ben said morosely as Terry reached for the switch.
The computer hummed to life. Underneath the dustcover, a blinking light indicated that the monitor was waking up.
“I’m not sure how much time we have,” Terry said, pulling off the dustcover with one hand and freeing up the keyboard with the other. “And it might take me half an hour just to figure out a way in.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” muttered Ben.
A dialogue box appeared on the screen, demanding a password. Terry thought for a few minutes, fingers poised above the keyboard, eyes narrowed in furious thought, and then tapped in a word. The screen froze, and then cleared; a desktop screen full of tiny software icons popped into existence.
“That easy?” muttered Terry. “No way.”
The screen suddenly changed abruptly, the background changing into a lurid poisonous tree-frog green, the software icons morphing into tiny faces with cartoon grins which, despite the crudeness of their rendition, managed to convey a sense of sardonic amusement. Terry snatched his hands from the keyboard, but it was already too late.
“Great,” he growled. “That must have rung every alarm bell in the building.”
“What did you do?” Tess said, a tinge of panic in her voice.
“Wrong password. I thought I had it figured out, but obviously…”
“Should we leave?” Ben demanded.
“Too late now. Wait a moment, here it comes again….”
The dialogue box popped back onto the screen, demanding a password.
“Blast,” Terry said. “If I get it wrong this time…”
“Would it self-destruct?” Magpie asked, in all seriousness.
Terry actually laughed. “In a manner of speaking, perhaps,” he said.
“You’d think he would have little need of a password,” Thea said. “If he were here, he would not have let anyone get this far. And if he were hoarding secrets, let’s face it, Terry, Ben is right—he probably wouldn’t have kept them in this hard drive. Not in an office right next to a bunch of kids who could do damage without even meaning to.”
Worldweavers: Spellspam Page 2