by CD Reiss
We worked out the route around corners and up stairs, padding the corners and moldings.
I jumped up on the flatbed to help Florencio with the top slab of drywall.
“Oh, Jesus. Is Cali-Boy’s going to pick up heavy things now?” Butthead hauled himself up.
“The store ain’t payin’ worker’s comp if you blow something, man,” Florencio said to me with a grunt. “Trust me on that.”
“I’ll keep your broke ass in mind when I visit you in the hospital,” I said.
We carefully turned the drywall sheet on its side.
“Who’s doing this with you?” Florencio asked as we angled the panel through the back door. “Better be somebody good.”
“Just me.”
“Come on, man. Nobody’s stupid enough to do this alone.”
“That’s me. Nobody.”
It took him a minute to get my joke, and he only acknowledged it by shaking his head in irritation. We were angling a seventy-pound sheet of drywall around Victorian-sized doorways.
The stairs were narrow, and the boards were wide and heavy. Jorge turned out to be Juanita’s husband, and Florencio made it a point to let me know he was single and Jorge was an idiot to have gotten married. Butthead said that not having any options was easier, but I didn’t believe him.
Covered in dust and breathing heavily, the four of us stood among the piles of debris in the master suite. I showed them the black mold on the plaster and the damage to the beams that had to be scraped away and reinforced.
“What’s the ceiling?” Florencio asked.
“Enamel on tin,” I answered. “The mold couldn’t damage it, but I don’t know what’s going on behind it. You might be back with two-by-fours to replace beams.”
“Dude,” Butthead stated, punctuating a final word. “You are not doing this by yourself.”
“What the fuck is this?” Jorge picked up the half-handled sledgehammer. “You didn’t even order a new handle?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but I had no excuse.
“And, wait,” Butthead said. “You did all this with that?”
“Don’t you assholes have somewhere to go?” I said defensively. “I have shit to do. Come on. Get out of here.”
They had a clock to punch, so they left me alone to bag old plaster and throw it off the balcony into the dumpster.
“Do you know how loud that is?” Harper said from the door. She had on her polo and lanyard. The bright yellow set off the fact that she looked exhausted.
“So? You don’t have neighbors.”
She ran her fingers over the lath. “Three days to GreyHatC0n.”
“Three days until you win five mill.”
“I’m going to enjoy taking your money.”
“It’s my partner’s. If it was mine, I’d just give it to you.”
“I wouldn’t take it.”
She put her arms around my waist, and I held my hands away from her. “I’m a sweaty mess.”
“I don’t care.”
My shirt stuck to me when she laid her cheek on my chest. I flipped my gloves off behind her back.
“Lead paint. Seriously. Mold. You’re breathing it.”
“So are you.” She didn’t let go, which made the next part of the conversation more difficult.
“I need something from you.”
“What?”
“The decryption for the object code.” She pushed me away, but I kept her close.
“Keaton has to unlock his.”
“It’s an act of good faith to give him your code first. I think we’re past me teaching you how to fuck anyway.”
“Very past.”
“Keaton’s been nagging me about it. I almost wish my phone was still in the bushes. But he has a point. They really need to check it over before we open it.”
She took a folded-up scrap of paper from her back pocket. “I figured you’d need it.” She handed it over. It had a teddy bear in a Santa hat on the top and the code written in blue pen.
4e 2d 2e 20 6d 20 2e 2d 2e 20 4d 2e
20 4e 20 6e 2d 20 2e 40 4d 20 2e
“Hex?”
It wasn’t a message when decoded. Just nonsense letters and punctuation.
She put her hand over it. “Nope. Don’t decrypt it yet. It’s for after. You’ll like it, I promise.”
“You’re asking a lot.”
“I deserve a lot.”
I put my thumbs on her shoulders and pushed her away. “Be naked when I get out of the shower.”
She tried to kiss me, but I wouldn’t let her. Her ass was so sweet as she walked out that I had to slap it.
I took a picture of the code and the Santa bear, then I called Keaton. “Hey, Keat.”
“I preferred when you were the face of this company,” he said. “Everyone’s asking for you.”
“Where are you?”
“New York. Where you should be. Now. Immediately.”
I was knee deep in moldy plaster and promises. I couldn’t leave the house looking like a construction site, and I couldn’t leave Harper to hack QI4 alone. “Can’t. Still stuck.”
“I will send you a car.”
“No. I’m doing something.”
“I don’t want to be here. This was not the deal. It’s your job to talk to the media and the stupid people.”
“Just be dark and mysterious. Brood and growl.”
“Tay—”
“I have the object code decryption key.”
I could practically hear tires screech on the other side of the country.
“Now, listen,” I said, walking onto the balcony. Below, the thorn bush still had our path to the center cut through it. “I can give it to you at 8 a.m. on Thursday. But I know you want it unlocked now.”
“You should too, don’t you think?”
“I do. I need you to promise me something first.”
“I’m starting to wonder where your loyalties lie.”
“In more than one place.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Promise you won’t come after the hacker.”
For a few seconds, all I heard from his side was the indistinct voices of a public place and his breathing. I assumed he was thinking about it. Barrington had made me into a civilian.
“I promise nothing,” he said. “But thank you for the code.”
“What?” I looked at my screen. The picture of the paper was on it. He’d hacked me, the motherfucker. He’d used our cellular connection to hack my phone.
“I hope to see you Thursday,” he said and hung up.
LV
Her upstairs room was actually a little suite with a full-size bed behind a door. She’d been as naked as a jaybird when I got upstairs, and we twisted around the sheets for a while, fucking as if our lives depended on it.
I thought about going to New York then pushed it away. Then considered it again. I could leave for a few days. I could come back and finish the bedroom. Come back to her. She’d be here. It wasn’t so long.
But no. It wasn’t that simple, if I was being honest with myself. Even after she cracked QI4, I was convinced I wouldn’t come back to Barrington.
I shut my phone off, and she set up her center monitor to pick up TV, opening the door so we could see it from bed. She even had a remote she’d built from an old TV version. Answering a few messages, I knew tension was building for GreyHatC0n. I knew everyone was in New York, working their asses off to get it set up, and I was in bed with the enemy. I had a twinge of guilt that stayed with me even after Harper brought up a bowl of grapes and put her knees on the bed.
“Is today Monday?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
She muted the TV signal. Crickets. Rustling grass. The hiss of her processor fans. The squeak of the weather vane turning in the wind above us. In the spaces where it all went silent, I could almost catch the sound of the river flowing.
“Do you hear it?” she said.
“Hear what?”
“Cather
ine cries on Mondays.”
“I didn’t realize there was a schedule.” I took the grapes and put them on the night table before gathering her in my arms.
She twisted my wrist to look at my watch. “She should be going by now. I know she’s in her room. I heard her in there on the way back up.”
“Maybe she’s not sad today.” I turned the sound back on. Commercials. I didn’t even know what we were watching. “We should throw her a party.”
Harper sat bolt upright, back on her knees in a ribbed tank top that rode up, exposing the space between her tits and her pajama bottoms. “Oh my God!”
“I was joking.”
“Her birthday is Thursday. I almost forgot.”
“Harper. We have—”
“And the room? Is it going to be done? We can make that a big gift! We can invite everyone!”
“GreyHatC0n starts Thursday,” I said with the flat affect of fact.
“So? It’s still warm enough for the backyard. Maggie can make a birthday cake.”
Harper dropped to her hands and knees and put her lips on my chest. I got hard before she even moved down.
“Who’s Maggie?”
“She lives over on Dandelion Road.”
I twisted my fingers in her hair as she got closer to my dick. “Every time I think I know everyone… oh, you little tease.”
“You’ll meet them at the party.”
“You have to crack my code, and I have to be on the phone to make sure you don’t. Or that everyone sees when you do. And the drywall…”
She ran her tongue from the base of my cock to the tip.
“We don’t have time to plan a…”
She sucked lightly on the back of the head.
“Ah, that. Perfect.”
Not much could distract me from my cock disappearing into her face. Not the news, which contained the usual reports of everyday malfeasance, faraway violence, and maps with overlaid swirls of cloud cover.
Except Keaton’s voice from the television.
“Quantum code was just a theory.”
I sat upright so fast Harper nearly choked.
“Sorry.”
I didn’t have to apologize. She wiped her mouth with her wrist and stared at the screen with me, watching the stone-cold confidence of Keaton Bridge.
“In three days, it becomes a reality.”
The black ball of the mic popped out of the frame while the female reporter asked the question. “We understand the system was hacked just eleven days ago?”
“It was an encryption overlay, and it exposed a flaw in our supply chain. The system itself hasn’t been touched. It is still the most secure system in the world. We challenge anyone in the world to hack it.”
“What if there’s more than one hack? Will two people get five million dollars?”
His knowing smirk could have frozen the deep blue sea. “Sure. Why not?”
“You do not have ten million dollars, you fuck.” I didn’t realize I’d said that out loud.
“He’s showing how confident he is,” Harper said.
“He’s going to bankrupt himself.”
She leaned into me, and I put my arm around her.
“He believes in it. And you,” she said. “He’s handsome.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Are you jealous?”
“No. Fuck that.”
The reporter had broken from Keaton to talk to some of the attendees outside the con, make some partially informed comments about hacking, and come back to the “biggest challenge prize ever.”
“He’s a criminal,” I continued. “And I think he was wearing makeup.”
She pulled away far enough to look at me. “You are jealous!”
“Just saying.” I pulled her closer so she wouldn’t see that, yeah, I was jealous.
The reporter took up the center of the screen to close out.
“She’s a total fluff-piece reporter,” I said.
“Yeah, she does the after-the-weather stuff.”
“She’s not a tech journalist. It’s insulting. I mean, it’s one thing to not know shit. It’s another to be proud you don’t.”
“The QI4 system will be online from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern this Thursday. Get your keyboards ready! The IP address will be posted on the QI4 website. The prize is awarded worldwide for any…” She made a show of looking at a piece of paper. “Invasive malware, adware, worms, DDoS, virus, or Trojan horse.” She put the paper down. “But according to everyone I’ve spoken to here, only a zero-day exploit will work.”
“And can you help us non-tech people? What is a zero-day exploit?” The guy in the left-side box smiled as if he knew damn well he’d forget the answer to his question before he finished his second Cosmo.
“It’s a hack invented from scratch, and apparently they’re worth five million dollars. So you better get to work!”
I shut off the screen.
“You should go to New York,” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“What if you need me?”
“You need to get over that right now. I’m not asking you for help. And you have your codes. Did he open the system?”
“Yes.”
“You need to go. This is a big deal for you.”
She was thinking of me. I didn’t deserve her. Brushing her hair away from her face, I wanted to crawl into her skin and love her unpredictable, brilliant soul from the inside.
“What kind of attack were you thinking of doing?” I asked.
“I was going to just put something in the comments to taunt you.”
I clamped my lips together. I didn’t know how to do the hack she wanted, one where she’d be able to edit the code, but I knew the mountains she’d have to climb because I’d built them. I could have easily defined those obstacles and cut her work in half.
As if reading my mind, she put her hand over my mouth. “Don’t. Even.”
“Mmph.”
She took her hand away.
“You can do it,” I said.
“I just locked your system. I didn’t crack it. This is a code-only hack. I can’t plant transmitters in your office. This is the real shit. I want to do it.”
“Do you promise to let me know if you’re having trouble?” She started to object, and I held up a finger. “Not right away. But if you get to the end and you haven’t done it.”
“Can I just suck your dick now?”
“I don’t know how to hack it. If I knew, I would have built a way to avoid it. But if you’re close, I can tell you what you’re up against. It’s still up to you to figure out.”
“Lie back.” She pushed me down and straddled me.
“When you get in there, you’re going to be shocked.”
She shifted down until her mouth was on my dick again. “I won’t be shocked. I’ll act bored.” She ran her tongue along my length, curling it around the curve of it.
“It’s different down to the motherboards.”
“So you say.”
She took me down her throat and sucked on the way out. I wasn’t going to be verbal much longer, so I just spit out the last sentence I could.
“I want you to win.”
LVI
Thank God for Barrington, USA.
If I’d had two solid days to hang, tape, and spackle drywall and another half a day to paint it, I still wouldn’t have gotten done in time. That became apparent a few hours into the project.
But Barrington showed up. Men who knew how to “do things” came and went through a revolving door, picking up pieces of the job bit by bit. They kept the site clean, did a better-than-average job, took the sink and toilet out so we could hang behind it, and went to get more stuff so often I started to wonder how much fell off a truck on the way to the distro center.
As far as my time went, I was useless forty percent of it. Calls kept coming. My coders, double-checking and rechecking that the system was correct. Keaton complained a
bout my absence. My mother called to see if I was excited. The venue called to make sure they had enough broadband for the traffic.
Harper stayed locked in her room, working. Late at night, we fucked and collapsed.
The morning of the party, Harper got out of bed before the sun came up.
“Hey,” I muttered. “It’s not even five in the morning.”
“It’s ten after five.” She kissed me gently. “You need to get a watch with a battery.”
I slid back in the bed until my back was to the wall. “Are you ready?”
“More than you. You haven’t even painted yet.”
I grabbed her, pulled her onto the bed, and rolled on top of her. She giggled when I tickled her.
“Stop.”
“Take these pants off before I rip them off.”
Laughing, she pushed me away. “Taylor! Really!”
“Really?”
She made her voice steady and solid. “Really. I just… I want to be at my best, and I want to be on the forums early in case anyone has any genius ideas. I don’t want to get behind.”
She rolled over to get away, but I grabbed her by the wrist.
“Taylor!”
“One second.”
“We’re not having sex now.”
“No sex.” I let her go and sat on the edge of the bed.
“You won’t even get hard?”
“I won’t. Give me your hands.”
She held them out. Her right index and left middle fingers were taped. I kissed each of her palms.
“These hands are going to do good work.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She tried to pull them away, but I yanked her back. Her hair crisscrossed her face.
“You have two minutes, goose.”
“Fine.”
I kissed every one of her finger joints. “No typos from you. No slipping off the keys from you. No cramps from you.” She giggled, and I continued to address her hands. “All of you will show up for work two Mondays from now, whether you’re counting money to five million or not.” I pressed them together and looked at her. “Your brain has to show up too.”