King of Code

by CD Reiss

 

  I flipped between the two. Yep. Same girl. Take the dark hair out of the equation, and there she was.

  I couldn’t remember her. I lived in a world where the smartest men in the world gathered and were too awkward to make it with the small percentage of fuckable women. Women had always been easy to get into bed, but I’d never fucked her. Not a blond her and not a brunette her. I was sure I wouldn’t have forgotten it.

 
  I’d remember this girl>

  The crying got louder and stayed consistent.

 
  you split>

  How many girls at MIT were that hot? You’d think my dick would at least have a little recollection. The photo of her had self-destructed already, but the cognitive consonance of her paired with MIT had imprinted the photo on my mind. It was her. Harper Watson. No bell was rung, except for the Sherlock Holmes story in the scattered code comments of the poison pill.

  Watson was a really common name, but the connection was made.

 

  I typed the statement but didn’t hit Send. He’d ask why I thought that. My answer was simple. I knew all the female hackers with the skills to pull this off, and she wasn’t one of them. I sent the message.

  NO CONNECTION

  The Wi-Fi had dropped. Reconnecting didn’t work. I ran the hacking apps and my network protocol analyzer to check for available signal. As a despairing female wail rattled the walls, the packet sniffer did its job.

  SCRAMBLER PRESENT

  A chill immobilized my spine.

  She’d seen I was on the Wi-Fi and cut me off.

  No.

  The name. Watson. Sidekick? Why not Sherlock or Holmes? Was I reading into it?

  Maybe the signal had just dropped.

  For all she knew, I was watching porn or checking email. Or could she see my conversation? It was encrypted end to end, but if she was good enough to hack QI4, nothing was safe.

  I swung my legs over the bed and went into the hall in bare feet, shirtless, sweat pants hiked up over the right knee but not the left.

  The crying was louder in the hall and seemed to be coming from every doorway. Harper had taken such a roundabout tour and there were so few markers that I was lost.

  Not that I knew what I was looking for. A sound besides crying. A light in the wrong place. The smell of ozone.

  “Ow!”

  I picked up my foot, leaned on the wall, and looked at the bottom of my big toe. I plucked out the splinter, but once I started walking again, I realized I hadn’t gotten all of it.

  “You need to redo these floors,” I grumbled to Harper as if she was in front of me and I had the authority to tell her what to do with her house.

  Taking my hand off the wall, I noticed I was close to the stairwell up to the third floor. I favored the toe as I climbed quietly. Too quietly. Every floorboard in the house groaned and squeaked, but not the stairs to the third floor. They were as worn as a 1911 staircase and as quiet as if they’d been built yesterday.

  She didn’t want anyone to know when she was going up here. Because I knew for shit sure, by the time I hit the top of the stairs, that she was behind that door. When I saw the photos at the top of the stairwell, I was even more sure. It was dark, but my eyes adjusted. It was her. Graduation cap. Braces. Clear, dewy skin and freckles. Prom. Satin dress and diamond earrings. Receiving an award. I couldn’t see the details of the award, but she was blond again. She was blond in all of them.

  I put my ear to the door, pressing against it until the crying inside the walls disappeared and all I could hear was the sound on the other side.

  Clicks. Tons of them. She was typing like a fiend.

  That was why she had tape on her fingers.

  My God. It was her. Harper had hacked QI4.

  What was with the kiss that wasn’t a kiss?

  What about the message on the factory roof?

  And the name?

  Why change it?

  Had she been married?

  How had she gotten the poison pill in the monitor?

  Was she still married?

  More than the name and the comfortable possibility that a man was involved in the hack, the thought of her having a husband didn’t sit right with me.

  I leaned on the door, listening to the pattern of the keystrokes. No waiting. Straight typing. Not waiting for a response from someone on the other side of the wires.

  The spacebar made a different sound. I pressed my ear to the door. How often it was hit told the story. Coding and English had a different spacebar cadence.

  A husband belied her tight innocence, and though none of it fucking mattered, I became momentarily obsessed with the idea that she was married. Maybe her rigidity was guilt. Maybe Mr. Watson was in a faraway desert war or making a living in another part of the country. He could be dead.

  I forgot to listen for the spacebar patterns. I didn’t notice when the keys stopped clicking at all. All I noticed was the change in gravity as its force went from beneath my feet to beneath my head as I fell. I got my feet under me in two steps, tumbling into the room when the door was opened.

  Standing straight, I whipped around to find Harper with her hand on the doorknob.

  “I knew it!” I said even though I’d known nothing until three minutes before.

  She yanked the door all the way open, teeth grinding, throat mid-growl. Her skin was lit by the whitish-blue of flat-screens, and the finger she pointed at me was wrapped with white tape. “Get out!”

  “How did you do it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  We circled each other like boxers in a ring. Behind her was the door, a desk, three monitors scrolling code, an ajar bathroom door. The monitors were flowing C++, a deep web database for a retailer, and a Tor chat. Following my gaze, she hit a key, then another, and the screens went dark.

  “How did you get into QI4?”

  She turned back to me, and we circled each other again. “Fuck you.”

  “Are you married?

  We stopped circling.

  “What?”

  I didn’t know what had come over me, and it didn’t matter. I didn’t care if she was married or not. I needed her to give me my life back.

  The utter stupidity of my question forced me to step away from my surprise and hostility. She’d hacked me. Fine. We had work to do. She and I.

  But I kept losing focus.

  She was that smart.

  In that body.

  Under a sleeveless ribbed tank, she was braless. Her nipples were rock hard. Her gym shorts rode low, giving me a peek at the smooth skin of her belly. If I kissed it, I’d be close enough to smell her.

  “Watson. Harper Watson. Who is Mr. Watson?”

  “Wait. Let me just…” Her eyes drifted over my face, down my naked torso, landing between my legs.

  I was wearing sweat pants, and I was very, very hard. Of course. The body always betrays the mind.

  She crossed her arms, covering her nipples but hiking her shirt up a little. “I’m not married.”

  “That’s good to know. Um, this is a surprise, but—”

  “Why? Because I live in flyover country or because I’m a woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are fucked up, Taylor Harden. You were always fucked up.”

  “Always fucked up?” She locked her jaw against another word, so I filled in. “Did I know you from MIT?”

  Her eyes flickered. I knew more than I was supposed to, and it unnerved her. Good.

  “IHTFP.” She unlocked her jaw enough to hiss the campus acronym for I hate this fucking place.

  “I didn’t… we didn’t…”

  “No. We didn’t. I was a freshman. You were fourth year, and you never came back after Christmas break.”

  I scanned my mind again, narrowing the parameters to the years before I left. Brunette Harper still wasn’t
there, but the photos hadn’t lied.

  “You had dark hair. Why?”

  “No one takes blondes seriously.”

  “No one takes… what?”

  “I know how it goes in tech. No one takes women seriously. We’re unemployable, unfinanceable, useless. And a blonde? All blondes are good for is sucking dick. I’ve been around Tor sites. As a guy. I know how you assholes talk. I know what you think.”

  Deny. Set yourself up as an exception.

  “I’m sorry.” I wasn’t. But whatever. I needed to get off the subject and onto more important topics, like what the fuck we were going to do about this mess. “First of all, I want to say… the hack? Wow.” I slow-clapped. I couldn’t tell if she appreciated my admiration at all, so I stopped. “How did you—”

  “Fat chance.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m not telling you shit.”

  I’d never met a hacker who wasn’t a show-off. Telling the community how you breached a target was ninety percent of the exploit’s fun.

  “Harper, you exposed a serious vulnerability. I’m willing to offer you a lot of money.”

  “Too late.”

  There wasn’t a hacker on earth who didn’t want to give the gory details of their exploits. At least none I knew, but they were all dudes. This was another planet.

  She just needed a little prodding.

  “It was Jack’s receipt on the desk. You run it through a sharpening algorithm? So you could see what we were ordering and from where? How did you intercept the monitors? The distro center outside town is Amazon. We got it from a store in Denver.”

  Her face didn’t change. That told me more than any expression. The effort to not signal acceptance or rejection was harder code than subtly answering without saying anything.

  She wasn’t telling me shit.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  She turned toward the monitors and tapped her fist against her mouth, but she didn’t say what she wanted. I got the sense she never would.

  “Why did you bring me here?” I asked gently because she held all the cards and her exploit wasn’t going as planned. That much I could tell.

  “I didn’t think you’d come here.”

  “Why leave the coordinates then?”

  “I thought you’d send people, like law enforcement or the news or anyone. I thought then everyone would see what’s happening here and feel sorry and understand and do something. But you didn’t, and now I don’t know what to do.”

  Like a soundtrack, the crying in the walls rose again. It had more of a sad, weeping quality and less of a wailing despair.

  “That’s not you,” I said.

  “It’s not.”

  “Who is it? Catherine?”

  “She’s sensitive. She gets like this a few times a week. Her heart breaks for everyone but herself.”

  “Who’s she crying for today?”

  Her throat expanded and contracted as she swallowed. The monitors made her eyes white at the edges. She was thinking, but I couldn’t tell what was on her mind.

  “Here’s what you’re going to do, Taylor Harden.” Her gaze went over my body again.

  My boner was gone, so her gaze lingered just above my waistband. I realized that though her expression was sexual and hungry and I liked sex as much as the next guy, I had no power in the relationship. The feeling wasn’t pleasant.

  “Go back to your room. Rest up. We’ll talk tomorrow morning.”

  “No. We talk now.”

  She spun the Herman Miller chair to face her. Twelve hundred dollars new. The most expensive piece of furniture in the house.

  “Good night.” She sat and swiveled herself in front of the bank of screens.

  “Now, Harper.”

  She acted as if I hadn’t spoken at all. With her back to me, she was still and calm. One screen came to life, asking for a password. The others stayed black, and I could see her reflection in them. She was crying, but somehow, she held her body still.

  “Close the door on the way out,” she said without a hitch in her breath. I’d never seen a woman with such control.

  She didn’t want comfort. Offering it could only make the situation worse. I had to do what she’d asked. What choice did I have? I opened the door, noticing the deadbolt for the first time. I could pick that if I needed to get back in.

  “Taylor?” The sexy, innocent girl who was suddenly more terrifying than any guy I’d ever met. Even crying, she was scary.

  “Yeah?”

  “I have a scrambler on your cellular data. And you won’t be able to get into the Wi-Fi again. I plugged that.”

  “You’re fast.”

  “Yep.”

  I had nothing left to say. I wasn’t going to stand there and beg for an answer.

  When you have no negotiating power, you have to use the only leverage you have.

  You walk away.

  XIV

  My father was a licensed contractor. He’d inherited the business from his father and assumed I’d take it over at some undefined future time. He bought property, fixed it, sold or rented it. He renovated and rebuilt houses if he liked the owners. It wasn’t unusual for my father to work Saturday and Sunday, miss dinner, come home with a beard after being gone for days at a time. I’d never met a man who worked harder for every penny he had, and for me and the citizens of our little world, he had plenty.

  My mother stayed at home with me and my little sister until she started school, then Mom kept the books at my dad’s business and brought us to the office after school and on weekends. She’d always been good with numbers, but at one point, she stopped using the calculator because it slowed her down. Once Dad ascertained that she hadn’t made a single mistake, he thought Mom’s genius was her most charming trait and bragged incessantly.

  Once Mom started working, Dad started taking me to jobs. If I was old enough to hold a wrench, I was old enough to tighten elbow joints. I learned everything he taught me, and I learned a lot of stuff he didn’t.

  He talked to my mother differently than he talked to me, and his tone with her in the office was different than his tone at home. He spoke to the guys who worked for him differently than he spoke to my mother. When he took me to the bank, his body language talking to the guy in the suit was different than the lady behind the glass.

  And always, always, always, he was in charge. My dad had a very small kingdom in the state of New Jersey. He didn’t have a big name or millions of dollars in disposable income. We didn’t have servants or an army. We were regular people.

  But he was a king.

  So in sixth grade, when they took me out of St. Thomas and put me in Poly Prep, I was in for the shock of my life.

  I had everything I needed, but there were people with more. Much more. People who didn’t work as hard. People whose power wasn’t earned but inherited or lucked into.

  A year at Poly cost more than double the national average income. I didn’t learn that until much later, but I knew at the time that something was off. The kids at Poly were different in ways I couldn’t pinpoint. They didn’t really know what their parents did for money and spent no time thinking about it. They didn’t know how to fix things and didn’t know how to find out. And Dad was different around their parents. Still confident but louder, brasher, less astute.

  It was as if he didn’t know how to crack their code.

  He didn’t know how to crack Mom’s either.

  Just as I was settling in, the stress of the money, the culture, the missed signals snapped her. She cleaned the house. Redid the books from the past two years. Accelerated every plan and activity.

  She was manic, and she was everywhere. Bake sales. Theater department treasurer. Substitute statistics teacher.

  Then she was depressed, and she was nowhere, and her room smelled of sweaty sheets and unbrushed teeth.

  I swore to myself it didn’t affect me. I swore I had it under control.

  And I did—as long as I was on lan
d.

  Gov (short for Governor, I kid you not), my best bud in that first year, invited me out on his dad’s sailboat for the weekend. In the first few hours, pulling out from the dock on Wiggins Park Marina, heading down the Delaware River and out toward the bay, the taste of salt and the thrust of the boat put me in high spirits. Gov and I talked about the kids in school, the sights on the banks of the river, and fantasized about the size of the fish we’d catch.

  As the Delaware Bay fell away and the dark fists of landmasses grew smaller on the horizon, I grew uneasy. Following Gov, I did some tasks below deck, got ready for lunch, and stayed calm.

  But it was out there. I knew it was out there.

  Gov and I were in the front of the boat, watching the lap and curl of the water around the tip of the boat. He left me there so he could pee or eat or answer his father’s call. With a sandwich in one hand and a can of Coke in the other, I was alone.

  Utterly alone.

  I didn’t have a landmass to orient by. The horizon was an endless circle around a spotless, treacherous sea. The sky was a flat blue, and the boat was nothing, nowhere, the finitely small about to be crushed by the infinitely large.

  The sky had weight, and it pressed against my chest. I was being snuffed out of existence as if I were no more than an offensive insect sliding on the curves of a pure white bathtub. I had to get out, but I was hemmed in by the indifferent sea.

  Gov said I threw up. Maybe that part was seasickness. The rest was a good old-fashioned panic attack.

  I pretended to laugh it off later, but inside, I never wanted to feel that insignificant again.

  In Barrington, with the sound of crickets outside, I didn’t just think about defeating Harper. I was distracted by the huge, unchanging physical landscape. Human instability. The breakdown of the small while the infinite spaces above could crush me with indifference.

  I had to remove all emotion. Breathe. Keep the panic at bay. I had to break down my judgments and preconceived notions so I could see the code and only the code.

  What could Harper want? Not a job. She hated me. Money? Capital? Power? Bragging rights? Sex?