“Oh, it’s too late for that,” Joe said and smiled.
Shit.
“Joe, be straight with me. What did you do?”
“Straight? Well, you know I can’t be straight.”
James rolled his eyes. Joe was gay.
“You’re hilarious. This isn’t a joke, what did you do?”
Joe leaned back in his chair and folded his hands.
“James, you’re the one who gave me Pandora’s box—you know I’m not the type of person who can leave it shut,” he said. “So, I tried tracing the IP address. Got nothing—total dead end. The traceroute just stopped, like there wasn’t a connected node. Thought it was a DNS glitch, but I confirmed that you did send it from that IP. So, I started snooping around, and um…what’s Magnus?”
James felt the blood suck from his head. He shut his eyes, steadied his hands on the table and drew a concerted breath.
“Joe…we gotta burn that computer. It was your Pi wasn’t it?”
“Funny—like I’d ever let anything happen to my baby,” Joe said. “Anyway, it was a relatively weak backdoor, so I tried reinforcing it by scanning around for other open ports—no such luck—but I did come across a strange SSH tunnel. Then I found a hashed private key after snooping around the box I was on, ran it through some custom cryptography—my new stuff is genius, by the way—and uncovered the key which let me into the tunnel. Jackpot! And, boy oh boy, what did I find?”
“What?” James said.
“James, exobytes—not terabytes—exobytes of data on all kinds of weird mythological shit. Dragons, zombies, killer clowns, aliens, you name it—but the weird part is the amount of data. It’s staggering—each creature covered in the widest range of detail imaginable. Psych profiles, tissue samples, 3D scans, life-cycles, breeding habits—it’s amazing.
“Then I did a search on your name. I found a dossier on you and it was ridiculously detailed—kinda weird, really. But, I digress. Do you know what this is? What this means?”
James stared.
“This must be one of the golden three’s computer! The originators of Comic-Con: Shel Dorf, Ken Krueger, and Richard Alf? It’s their computer or something, isn’t it? Only nutty bastards like them could possibly amass information like that. Magnus must be their codeword!”
A heavy sac of flour fell off James’ chest.
“Wait, let me get this straight. You flew all the way out here because you thought I hacked into some dead alpha geek’s computer?”
“Totally! Do you know what kind of power we can wield with this access?”
“Listen, buddy, you know I love you. But, I gotta ask you to let me rest. Forget what you saw, or thought you saw. Let’s sync up for breakfast in the morning. I promise I’ll go into more detail then.”
From the look on Joe’s face, somewhere, somehow, a puppy had just died.
“Are…are you serious?”
“Yup. Please, you know me better than anyone. We need to revisit this some other time.”
“Okay, tomorrow morning then, promise?”
“Promise.”
“Can I…uh, crash here?”
“Of course, grab the couch in the upstairs loft. Sorry man, but I gotta hit the hay.”
James watched his friend move sloth-like from his kitchen, lumber upstairs, then plop on his couch. Joe would be all right—his inner geek had a way of overriding his inner genius. Comes with the trade.
The text message. Dammit! Jessie must think I’m dead!
James rushed to his phone, flicked open her message and replied, “all is well—don’t worry or notify the police. will explain in the morn. love J”
The marrow ached within his bones. As he went to set his phone to do-not-disturb and slid a foot under the corner of his bed sheet, he received another message from an unknown number. Somehow, James knew exactly who had sent it.
Game on in two, maybe three weeks.
The mouse is coming out to play.
Get some rest, we are watching.
Two contacts came attached with the message: Olivia Young and Trevor Banks.
James, though weary, clenched his fists as he allowed sleep to overtake him, and just as the sleep faeries sprinkled their dust—those were real now, he knew—he reached inside himself in search of that dark void, that missing piece to his happiness, which had plagued him for so long. It had gone and left a purpose—a newfound resolution—in its place.
James was damn-well going to live up to it.
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J.S. Leonard resides in his birthplace, Las Vegas, Nevada, where he slings words, code and colors into remarkable experiences. He is married to a pretty rad chick and has two crazy young boys. No, he doesn’t gamble. Yes, people actually live in Las Vegas.
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