King of Code

by CD Reiss

  Tapping the spacebar did nothing. She’d shut her system down when she wasn’t at it. Good girl.

  I hit the power button. The floppy disk drive (yes, the floppy drive) croaked to life, and the fan spun. While it booted, I opened her drawers.

  Hackers distrust computers for good reason. We’re big fans of pencil and paper with their eternal compatibility and geographical security. Harper was no different. Her desk drawer was full of scraps of paper, analog office supplies, and wooden pencils. A girl after my own heart.

  That being the case, I ignored what was inside the drawer in favor of what was hiding under it.

  I pulled the drawer all the way out and felt along the bottom panel. Flat wood all the way to the back…until I came to a ridge. Something stuck in the seam between the bottom and back panels. I flicked it with my fingernail, felt it give a little, then got under it and slid out a little green notebook.

  Sitting at her desk chair, I flipped through. Calculations and drawings for a tiny circuit I recognized as the poison pill she’d left in the monitor at QI4. Seeing the drawings, how she did it with a soldering iron and a cut board from a cheap cellphone, I started to sweat. My face got hot. Was it anger or embarrassment? Was it the fact that she’d done what anyone could have?

  No.

  This was special.

  She’s special.

  And she did you a favor.

  The pain in my chest should have decreased when I saw the details, but it got worse. The simplicity and scale of the design couldn’t have been reverse engineered, and I had to give her credit. With very little to go on, she’d cracked open what I’d sealed tight.

  What the notes didn’t tell me was how she’d gotten into the monitors or how she’d gotten a signal past the Faraday cage. It didn’t tell me where she’d hidden the transmitter that went into and out of the cage often enough to move pieces of data.

  Most importantly, it didn’t tell me why learning how to fuck like a pro was on her virgin radar.

  I brushed my hand under my nose and smelled only soap. I’d washed the sweet scent of her off my fingers.

  Taylor Brian Harden

  023-56-1029 5/29/88

  Camden, New Jersey.

  Cooper’s Poynt El. Grad ‘01.

  Poly Preparatory HS. ‘05 MIT ‘05-‘08

  M-Julie Kips 078-11-1876

  F-David Harden 173-63-1850

  Mar 07/12/85, St Paul Episc.

  923 N. Jordan Rd. 08103 856-365-2289

  Ella Susan Harden 09/05/91

  Cooper’s Poynt El. Grad ‘05. Camden HS. ‘09

  Rutgers MBA Bus Admin ‘13

  084-55-6570 Mar. Quentin Mitchell

  04/23/13 034-15-2230

  Pets - Goldfish - Irving d. 6/99.

  Sib. Husky - Jamesey d. 10/02

  Fiona Messing ‘05 Donna Grettin ‘05

  Brenda Svenka ‘06 Carolyn Borlyn ‘06

  Katrina Yu ‘06 Franziska Popp ‘06

  She was good. Organized. Tight and unemotional. After the social security numbers of my entire family, the addresses, the names and deaths of every pet I’d ever owned, the women in my life took up pages. Some of it had been culled from interviews and articles. Some from rumor. My family’s socials had been pulled from some dark corner of the internet. The picture of me that had been stuck in the pages was on photo paper. Eighth grade graduation. Green cap and gown. An A+ nerd. I flipped to the back.

  Grace: Let’s hang out this summer. - Taylor

  Grace Kensington hadn’t taken even one of my calls in the months before high school, but a year ago, to support an opiate habit, she’d sold a bunch of Taylor Harden mementos on eBay in anticipation of my upcoming fame. Photos. Yearbooks. A Christmas card. I’d bid up the price of the yearbook with two fake accounts and bought it for far more than it would ever be worth.

  I ripped the page out and stuck the picture back in. I didn’t care about my info. None of it would get Harper anywhere. But she had too much on my family. She’d done her work a little too well.

  I put the notebook back in the seam and put the drawer back in. I yanked on the bottom one. It was locked. I jimmied it open with a paperclip from the top drawer.

  The computer was finished booting. The monitor was still black, and the boot code flowed up the screen in greenish characters, ending in a C-prompt.

  C:

  Old school DOS. Nothing fancy. Not a bell or a whistle in sight. It didn’t ask for anything because the user was supposed to know what to enter. How many password fails before the system locked completely? Didn’t matter. I could deal with that.

  The bottom drawer was full of shit, but I knew what I was looking for. I looked under manila folders full of old bills, a sweater, a half-used box of pens, and found a floppy disk with BSD labeled in blue pen.

  I stuck it in and rebooted, holding down F5 until…

  Bypassing System Files…

  And there it was. I checked the index, added a few programs to the config and autoexec files, and had access to everything. The machine hummed, waking up a more user-friendly OS.

  I scanned the files and found one called QI4, but it was just a collection of articles about the system. A personal profile of Beezleboy. I found a subfolder with the incorporation papers and a deeper subfolder with two links to blogs about Alpha Wolf, aka Keaton Bridge.

  Otherwise, nothing. Nothing hidden. Nothing protected. I knew where to look for shit a user didn’t want found, and she had nothing. None of it. Either she was a genius or… well, there was nothing else to say. She’d left me with a lock I could pick and an empty computer.

  Chrome hooked up to the web right away. Worked fine from up here, proving she was scrambling signal to isolate me.

  Jesus. She was using an AOL address.

  All right. This was pure bullshit.

  I found Tor, the most popular browser for the dark web, and opened it. I went to the most recent page and got an eyeful of a Chaxxer conversation between @TheWatsonette and @Flow_Bro.

  And it was filthy.

  I scanned it quickly so I wouldn’t get any harder than I already was.

  /Your pussy is so wet. You squirt

  into my mouth when you come./

  /I can take your whole cock down my

  throat. Shove it all the way in until

  I’m kissing your balls./

  /Spread your cunt apart and…/

  /I’m ready for you, my Prince./

  Oh, fuck that. I couldn’t read another word, and so much for not getting a hard-on. I rode a wave of jealousy, then a swell of rage, into a trench of sorrow. She wasn’t completely innocent, but she didn’t talk like this to me. Not that I would have minded. But I was confused. I couldn’t fit all of it into my head. My finger inside her. Her eager sexual authenticity. The membrane gently squeezing my finger.

  Sitting up straight, I pretended I was reading someone else’s account. Some strange woman I’d hacked. Someone I didn’t care about.

  /You like when I call you a whore./

  The chat ended there. She’d left. Which was good because I wasn’t reading another word. My pretense shattered.

  What was she doing? She didn’t have to talk to this @Flow_Bro guy, if it was even a guy. Was she looking for achievement points to please him? Was that what this was about?

  The reality I had lived with for the past few days was shaken. I had to see her. Touch base. Make sure she was still Harper. Not quite innocent, not quite jaded. Dirty talker, maybe. I didn’t know.

  Why didn’t I know?

  Why did it matter?

  It mattered. I didn’t have to know why. I only had to know what was. Was the cat alive or dead? Why it was in a fucking box was irrelevant.

  Voices came from the second floor. I wasn’t ready to admit I’d broken into Harper’s room, so I shut down and tiptoed to the door, hearing a male and female voice.

  “Where is he?” The guy sounded a little pissed off.

  “Upstairs. Johnny, leave it be.”<
br />
  “What’s going on with him?”

  “What do you mean?” Now Catherine seemed a little pissed herself.

  “Cath, don’t pretend you’re not a grown woman.”

  “Don’t ask questions I don’t want to answer.”

  “You want her getting hurt?”

  “It’s time for you to go.”

  The voices became indistinguishable murmurs, then the two of them appeared in the front drive, stopping by Johnny’s truck to talk. He had on his yellow polo shirt and a blue zip-front jacket that hid his tattoos.

  My ride was in the shop, and I was in the middle of nowhere. Was I going to sit around and wait for Harper to come back? Read more of her dirty talk? Putter around the kitchen?

  No. None of it.

  I slid onto the stairwell and used my tie clip to lock the deadbolt behind me, then I took the stairs two at a time until I was in the front yard. Catherine was coming back toward the house, and the truck was pulling forward.

  “Johnny!” I knocked on the back of the truck, and he stopped. Leaning into the passenger side window, I asked, “You going to the distro center?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is Harper there?”

  “I think she’s filling in a shift.”

  “Can you take me?”

  He leaned back as if he was trying to see the entirety of what I wanted. “She’s working.”

  “I’ll wait.” I pulled the handle, but the door was locked. “Look, I don’t have a phone. I don’t have a car. So if that means I sit and wait, I sit and wait.”

  Johnny glanced at the clock then clacked the locks open. “I’m not going to be late on your account. She’ll likely be on break in an hour.”

  I climbed in. The car smelled of dog and baby powder. Johnny turned onto the narrow highway. Pictures of children and young adults hung from the visors and rearview.

  “Your kids?” I asked.

  “What do you want with Harper?”

  “Nothing.”

  Johnny huffed and got onto the interstate, speeding up to the limit. “Your lie stinks worse than a dog’s asshole.”

  “I’m trying to not get my fingers broken, if you don’t mind.”

  “She told you about that, did she?”

  “You didn’t ask for my opinion but—”

  “Sure didn’t.”

  “She’s a grown woman. She can make her own decisions.”

  He didn’t talk for a while, and I had nowhere to go with my statement. The long, yellow distro center came up on the right like a giant hunk of cheese in a puddle of parking lot. We slid off the exit toward it. A line of yellow trucks steered onto the interstate like sticks of butter on a conveyor belt.

  “I’m not saying I did everything right in my life,” Johnny said. “But if I see a bonehead like Damon trying to make time with her, or that asshole Lawrence, you can trust me one thing: I’m stopping it.”

  He turned down a wide driveway. Two food trucks were parked on either side of the road. One with tacos, one with burgers and fries. Plastic tables and chairs ringed the backs of the trucks. Beyond them stood the yellow guard tower.

  Johnny stopped behind the taco truck and unlocked the doors. “I’ll tell her you’re here.”

  I opened my door but didn’t leave. Not yet. “I don’t need your permission, so I’m not asking. I’m telling you that Harper and I might or might not do whatever the fuck we want.”

  He leaned over so far I could smell lunch on his breath. My fingers ached. I bent them into fists.

  “If you do,” Johnny said, “you better get her out of this shithole.”

  Was he demanding I marry her? Jesus, I just wanted QI4 back in one piece and maybe a few spins around her body to get it. I couldn’t promise anything except that I wouldn’t make her or Barrington my responsibility.

  “She’ll do what she wants.” That seemed noncommittal enough while still being true. She would do what she wanted no matter how fast I ran or how far behind I tried to leave her.

  XXX

  By my calculations, her lunch hour should have fallen around 6:40 p.m.

  I sat. I stood. I paced. I kicked cans. A shift came out, lined up, and went back in. I helped the guys behind the taco truck haul the garbage onto a pickup. They gave me a container of pozole and a little white plastic spoon to eat it with.

  A horn hooted from the yellow building. For a few seconds, nothing happened, then people started streaming toward the trucks.

  Reggie came out in his yellow polo with an ID card hanging from a lanyard. I sat with him and a few other guys in yellow shirts and lanyards, talking about baseball and this dude Donnie’s garage renovation. When their half hour lunch was up, Reg said he’d tell Harper I was waiting for her, as if it was totally normal for a guy to hang out in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a girl. They gave me a wave and went back through the gate, and I waited alone again.

  I checked the time on my wrist, but my watch was gone. I was nowhere, never, without a buoy to navigate to. The only thing to do was wait.

  * * *

  Keaton had led me down to his parents’ basement and snapped the deadbolt behind him. We were in a concrete room with a washer and dryer, hanging shirts, and an ironing board. The circuit breaker door didn’t close all the way.

  “What’s your dad do for a living?” I asked.

  “Mossad.” He smiled a little. “CIA sometimes. He’s a quadruple agent. A freelancer.”

  The look on my face must have been pure horror because that was what I felt. We were red, white, and blue; apple pie; e pluribus unum.

  Keaton laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. “I’m joking. Man, you should see yourself.”

  He brought me through the laundry room to his inner sanctum.

  “Where’s your accent from?” I changed the subject.

  “Mother Russia,” he said with a thick Russian growl. “I have as many accents as I want.”

  The inner room was finished with grey industrial carpet and a black leather couch. A huge flat-screen with gaming cubes sat on one side of the room, and on the other was a bank of computers.

  “Donna Breckenridge,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

  I shrugged, leaning over to look at the ASCII chart pinned to the wall. “Nothing to talk about. We held hands, then she pretended I didn’t exist.”

  “And Ryder nailed you at lunch.”

  I’d gotten a nasty “accidental” elbow in the ribs that still smarted.

  “Unrelated.” I ran my fingers over the keyboards. We had computers at school, but my parents couldn’t afford to get me a laptop of my own.

  “False.” He pulled out a chair. “Women are all about getting you to do things. Ryder’s in my grade. He’s been dating Donna and talking to Jennifer Paige. Donna sees him talking to Jennifer and uses you to make him jealous. Ryder’s a dumb twat, so he did what dumb twats do. Gets on you to prove a point. Jennifer gets scared. Donna’s vindicated. Ryder’s back in her pocket. Done.”

  He was right. I knew it in my guts.

  “You want to get her back?” Keaton asked.

  I shrugged. “She’s not that hot.”

  “I don’t mean ‘get her back.’ I mean payback.”

  My heart hadn’t been shattered or anything, but I was curious about what he had on his mind. “Sure?”

  “Have you ever heard of the dark web?” He flipped on a computer. The hard drive whirred and clicked.

  “No.”

  “Sit down. You’re going to love this shit.”

  I sat down, and he taught me everything. I loved that shit.

  * * *

  Between the yellow shirt and the direct sunlight, her polychrome irises seemed paler. Her hair had escaped the rubber band. The flyaways looked like gold solder wire.

  “What do you want, miss?” I asked nonchalantly from my new home in a white plastic chair. “This is my spot.”

  “Lunch?”

  “I’ve had the pozole and a burger. Both were good. I not
iced the Hispanic people eat at the burger truck by about the same ratio as the taco truck. White people are about a seventy-three/twenty-seven in favor of the burgers. I’ve seen one black person all day.”

  “What did they eat?”

  “She brought her lunch.”

  “Can’t blame her. This stuff starts to wear on you.”

  “What are you having?” I asked, standing. “I’ll buy.”

  She sighed. “A burger, I guess. I’m not feeling tacos.”

  “Tacos? Fuck that. They have a menu that takes up the entire side of the truck. Have you tried the pozole?”

  “I don’t even know what that is.”

  I shook my head and leaned down so I could whisper in her ear. “How to fuck is the least of what you need to learn.”

  She elbowed me. “You’re such a jerk. You still haven’t apologized for freaking out.”

  “I’m sorry.” I led her to the taco truck. “Now that you know the social norms and I know your fragile condition, I’m sure it won’t happen again.”

  “I guess I can’t blame you. I’m a statistical outlier.”

  “I love it when you talk dirty.”

  I ordered her the pozole, but I wasn’t thinking about statistics or soup. I was thinking about the dirty talk I’d seen on her Chaxxer account, which I wasn’t supposed to know about since I’d boot loaded her machine and broken into her room like a thief.

  She took the soup with both hands, and we sat down.

  “Thanks for the boot loader decryption,” I said. “And your phone.”

  I slid it over to her. She let it sit. Her breath rippled the surface of the soup as she blew on it. “Have you ever heard of the Stockholm Syndrome? It’s when a hostage sympathizes with their captor.”

  “Never had it.” I swirled the straw in my hot horchata. “Stockholm’s cool though.”

  “You have it bad. You’re thanking me for giving you back what’s yours and apologizing for sex I made you have.”