—[41] Really, John? Ugh.—
When I got out, though, my mind was clearer than it had been since I stepped off the plane. I felt like I was at an apogee, the caffeine high wearing off but the crash not quite begun. What I needed, I thought, was help.
“Sarah,” I said, tossing the towel aside and pulling on the hotel-issue bathrobe[42].
— [42] John's carelessness in hotel rooms is one of many reasons I'm glad I don't have an integral camera.—
“Do you still have that line to Jiiya in Kyoto?”
“Unfortunately. I wish you'd let me get rid of it. He's a creep[43].”
—[43] A 'line', in this context, is a hair-thin connection over the Wildernet to some particular fairy burrow or domain. It means hosting the tiniest part of that burrow on a piece of my system dedicated to the purpose. I'm well-protected, obviously, but every time I'm reminded the things are there it makes me feel like I need a shower.—
“Give him a poke and tell him I need his help. Grab a copy of SS AntiFae and send it over to him, tell him I want to know—hypothetically, of course—if he could get through it without leaving any trace.”
“He's going to want something.”
“Tell him I'll owe him a favor.”
“You're not serious,” Sarah said. “I would have thought you learned your lesson about favors after last time.”
“Just do it, all right? I'll handle Jiiya[44].”
—[44] Easy for him to say. He doesn't have to feel the creepy old man's greasy fingers groping his dataports.—
Sarah muttered something I didn't catch, but made no further protest. I sat down at the desk and inhaled the contents of several of the white containers, washed down with a $10 beer from the minibar. What the hell, I just got paid, right?
“Ugh,” Sarah said. “He stinks of those pickled plum things.”
“Is he going to have a look?”
“Yes. He says you owe him a quote ‘really big favor’ unquote.” Sarah sighed. “You realize, of course, that we already got paid for this job?”
“I know, I know.” I hopped onto the bed and fumbled for the remote. “You can start putting up my availability in the usual places, all right? When did Jiiya say he'd have something?”
“A few hours.”
I clicked the TV on and surfed the hotel cable, looking for something mindless and distracting, preferably with explosions. I must not have found it before the jetlag got me, though, because I woke up to Sarah's voice and a documentary about toilet-paper manufacturing.
“John!” she said. “Don't make me break out the klaxon.”
“I'm up.” I yawned and glanced at the window, surprised to find it was already full dark. Seattle's warm enough that you forget how far north it is; in winter twilight is at around half past three. “What's happening?”
“I got the results from Jiiya.” Something in her voice made me sit up and pay attention.
“Did he find anything interesting?”
“I'm really not sure,” Sarah said. “But you're going to want to have a look at this.”
~
An hour later, I was behind the wheel of a rental car, poking slowly through a Kirkland subdivision, trying to make out the house numbers.
“That's it,” Sarah said. “Up ahead, on the left.”
I flashed the high beams and confirmed that the number on the front door matched the one I'd pulled off a resume-sharing site. That trail was a couple of years old, and I hoped Delphi hadn't moved recently. Tracking down any sort of contact info had been surprisingly difficult.
“Are you sure you know what you're doing?” Sarah said.
“Nope.” I cut the engine. “But you saw Jiiya's analysis. I don't think we can just leave this alone.”
“I mean about her. Are you sure we can trust her?”
I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. “I think so. I got a good feeling from her.”
“Oh, that's a relief,” Sarah drawled. “You don't have anything more concrete to go on than your hunches[45]?”
—[45] Or urges.—
“Not unless you count the fact that without her, we're screwed.”
She didn't have anything to say to that. I got out of the car and hurried up the walk. It was a small house of the sort you occasionally see blocking traffic on the back of a tractor-trailer, and the small lot showed signs of the classic 'just let everything die' style of geek lawn care; the front door was flanked by an angled window, but curtains blocked any view of the inside.
I rang the bell and, for good measure, rapped a long tattoo on the wood[46].
—[46] I should add that we'd stopped at a Starbucks along the way to top up John's caffeine/sugar/fat tanks, which explains why he was acting like a chimp on meth.—
A minute or so passed, while I continued to make a nuisance of myself. Eventually I heard heavy footsteps inside, and Delphi's voice, heavy with sleep, said through the door, “Unless this is Publisher's Clearing House with a novelty check the size of a surfboard, keep that up and I'm calling the cops.”
“Delphi, it's me,” I said. “John Golden. We need to talk.”
“John? What are you—did you follow me home from work?”
“No, I got your address off the net. Listen—”
“My address isn't on the net.”
“It is if you look in the right places.” I realized, somewhat belatedly, that I wasn't making a terribly good impression. “Look, this isn't what you think.”
“It had better not be, because I'm about two seconds from dialing 911.”
I took a deep breath. “I know who planted the fairies in your system.”
There was a pause.
“Someone really infested us deliberately?” she said. I could hear cold anger in her voice.
“I can't prove it yet, but yes, I think so.”
“You think so,” she said, “or you're sure?”
“I'm pretty sure.”
“Pretty sure?” She sighed, and I heard the lock click. “All right. Before you come in, you should know that there's a security camera above the door and it's already taken your picture. Also, I have a bat.”
“Where the hell did she grow up?” I muttered to Sarah.
“Seems like a sensible set of precautions to me,” Sarah said in my ear[47].
—[47] John has (obviously) never had the experience of being the only pretty young woman in an office full of young men. I would keep a bat next to the door too, if I lived alone, and still had a body.—
I was about to respond with something pithy like, 'Sure, for a zombie apocalypse', but at that point Delphi opened the door, and I lost my train of thought again. She had her hair down, and it fell in tousled waves on one slim, bare shoulder exposed by the too-large neck of the man's t-shirt she was wearing, which hung like a tent on her slim frame and covered her to the knees. She didn't actually have a bat—it was a bokken, a wooden practice sword for kendo, well-suited for cracking skulls, and she rested it idly on her other shoulder as though she knew how to use it.
Something about the combination of the rumbled, vulnerable look and the deadly weapon reached down into my hindbrain and pushed a few highly significant buttons, with the result that I stood there for a few seconds with my mouth open while my mind crashed, dumped core, and restarted.
“Well?” she said. “Are you coming in?”
“Excuse John,” Sarah said, painfully loud through the earpiece so that Delphi could hear. “He's a pig.”
~
A few minutes later, I was sitting at Delphi's kitchen table, pushing aside a few stacks of magazines to clear a bit of space. Her place was a mess, in a way that I found endearingly familiar. It was the mess of the young woman on her own in the suburbs for the first time, used to living in a kind of groove between bed, bathroom, and computer, suddenly blessed with more square footage than she knows what to do with. I'd gone through a similar phase when I first left New York, complete with the hand-me-down couches and the kind of frame
d prints they sell at IKEA.
It was also the mess of someone who rarely or never entertained visitors, especially visitors of the opposite sex. This put to rest a concern that had started growing in the back of my mind ever since I'd realized that man's t-shirt that served as her sleepwear might once have belonged to an actual man[48].
—[48] Clearly the most important thing to be worrying about at this juncture!—
Delphi re-emerged from the depths of her bedroom, more professionally dressed and looking considerably better rested than she had that morning. Some ingrained host-reflex made her go into the little kitchen and peer into the fridge.
“Do you want something to drink?” she said. “There's Diet Snapple, and water, and...that's it.”
“I'm fine.” She sat down across the table from me, Diet Snapple in hand, and I pulled Sarah's earpiece out, turned the volume up, and set it between us. “Thanks for letting me in.”
“I'm still wondering if it was a good idea,” she said. “The boss seemed pretty unhappy when you were talking to him. What happened?”
I remembered that Falmer had sent her home early on, and gave her a brief summary of our conversation. She frowned.
“That...doesn't make any sense,” she said. “The 'research lab' is a joke. It's just a couple of old workstations I set up running some fancy analysis graphics on big monitors. The whole thing was a dog-and-pony show for investors, so we could show them something sexier than the machine room. There's nothing important in there.”
“Falmer apparently thinks otherwise.”
“Maybe he just wanted to get rid of you?”
“According to my contract, he has to pay me off anyway,” I said.
“Hmm.” She cocked her head. “You obviously have a theory.”
“I think that lab is hosting another burrow. Whoever planted the fairies started out by bringing them there, and then some of them escaped out into the wider network. They never crossed the perimeter security, so they never set off your alarms.”
“'Whoever planted the fairies'—you realize it has to be Mr. Falmer, don't you?”
“I wasn't sure who had access to that lab.”
Delphi shook her head. “Aside from him, just me. Like I said, it was strictly for show, no actual work going on. And I'm damn sure I didn't do it.”
I glanced at Sarah's earpiece, recalling her question about whether Delphi was trustworthy. But there was nothing for it now.
“All right. So it's Falmer who brought the fairies in.”
“Why would he do that?”
“That's what I'm not completely sure of. But take a look at this.”
I dug my tablet out from where it lived in the bag next to Sarah, and pulled up Jiiya's analysis of SS AntiFae. The old man's commentary ran down one side of the page, beside a graphic representation of the structure of the software. For the most part the image looked like a neat, regimented blueprint for some complicated building, but it had grown what I can only describe as tumors, which the graphic rendered in shifting, putrid colors.
“What the hell?” Delphi's brow furrowed. “The guys upstairs have diagrams like this pinned to the walls. But what's this...stuff?”
“Fairy code.”
“Excuse me?”
“Chunks of code derived from a fairy-infested system.”
“I didn't think you could do that,” Delphi said. “I'm not a programmer, but—”
“You can't,” Sarah interrupted. “It's crazy.”
I nodded. “Jiiya—my contact, the one who did this analysis—says the craziest thing is that it all works. It's like having tiny bits of fairy mixed into your program.”
“Why would you want that?” Delphi said.
“We're not sure,” I said. “But Jiiya thinks that if you came at it just right, you could trigger the pieces into—”
Delphi was already running ahead to the conclusion. “Into letting you through the antifae entirely. You think it's a backdoor.”
“Exactly.”
There was a long pause.
“Fuck,” Delphi said, with considerable feeling.
“That's about the shape of it,” I said.
“You have to go to the police,” she said. “I'm going to lose my job, but fuck. If Falmer's behind it, there must be something in it for him. Blackmail, probably. 'Pay up or I let fairies destroy your company.' That unbelievable bastard.”
“It may not be that simple,” I said. “Right now we don't actually have any evidence.”
“We've got this!” She tapped the tablet. “Your analyst can testify.”
I coughed. “Jiiya's a fairy I met while working in Japan. I don't think his analysis would be admissible.”
To her credit, Delphi didn't even flinch at this. To most people, the very idea of working with a fairy sounded mad, since fairies are by definition completely untrustworthy.
It's hard to explain to them that there are a few rare cases who are only mostly untrustworthy.
Instead, she considered for a moment, and then said, “Then we could put it out on the Wildernet anonymously. Get people to do their own checking.”
“I'm not sure that's a good idea either. Most people wouldn't believe us, but once the fairies get wind of it, every installation of SS AntiFae could be vulnerable. How many are there?”
Delphi grimaced. “Around forty million systems.”
“And Falmer would deny everything, of course,” I said. “So there wouldn't be a fix easily available.”
“Damn,” she said, quietly, tapping the tabletop with one finger. “You said you needed my help. Does that mean you've got a plan?”
“In a sense.” I took a deep breath, and explained.
Delphi stared at me, uncomprehending. I swallowed nervously and explained the plan again.
“You want me,” she said slowly, “to help you break in to the office, and then break into the network, so you can get into the research lab and find this second fairy burrow you're sure is there?”
“Yes. More or less.”
“And what exactly would this achieve?”
“If Falmer is planning blackmail, or even espionage, he must have a fairy ally who knows how to exploit the weakness in the antifae. Something he's made a deal with. We call a creature like that a genie, and they are really bad news. Quite apart from the danger of worldwide infestation, Falmer's life could be in jeopardy if he's invited the wrong thing in from the Wildernet.”
“His life?” Delphi laughed weakly. “What, like something is going to jump out of his monitor and eat him?”
Her grin faded as she took in my expression.
“It doesn't happen often,” I said. “But it does happen. You need a unique combination of a very powerful fairy and a very stupid human. The results aren't pretty.”
“So you think this creature is in the research lab, and your plan is to break in there and kill it.”
“Right. Without his ally, Falmer will have no way of exploiting his backdoor, and we can confront him with the evidence and force him to get rid of it.” I had to admit it was a pretty thin plan, but it was the best I'd been able to come up with.
Delphi closed her eyes and blew out a long breath.
“Sarah,” she said after a moment, “what do you think?”
I started a little in surprise. It's not that Sarah's opinion isn't worth consulting[49] but rather that most people tend to forget that she's there. I've gotten used to having her all to myself, as a private voice in my ear.
—[49] Thank you.—
“It's a little reckless,” Sarah said. “But, though it pains me to say so, I haven't got anything better. Except of course that we could just walk away and do nothing, since there's no chance of getting paid for any of this.”
“Leaving millions of systems open to fairy infestation,” I said.
“Meaning more work for us!” Sarah sighed. “All right, all right. I suppose we can't just leave it.”
“What if John gets into the second burrow and the
creature is more than he can handle?” Delphi said.
“Then we're in deep trouble,” I said.
“But that isn't likely,” Sarah said. “John can handle quite a lot[50].”
—[50] What? It's true. He may be a mouth-breathing lunkhead in most respects, but fighting monsters is what you might call his area of expertise.—
Delphi tapped her finger in silence for a few moments. Then she repeated, very quietly, “Fuck.”
I raised an eyebrow.
She pushed her chair back from the table with a sigh. “Let me get my stuff.”
~
Anyone hoping for a bit of thrilling super-spy acrobatics at this point, in which I clamber through ventilation ducts and carefully maneuver around laser tripwires, is in for a disappointment. For starters, Serpentine Systems wasn't that kind of facility, and more importantly that kind of thing isn't really a part of my skill set.
According to Delphi, the staff would all be gone by eight in the evening—Mr. Falmer was very insistent on the importance of work/life balance—but there would still be a security guard at the front desk. Accordingly, we parked around back, and she walked in alone and told the guard she'd forgotten her ID. The guard asked her to scrawl her name on a clipboard and then buzzed her through, thus avoiding any automated safeguards that might be tripped if she'd swiped her card.
Around the side of the building was a metal security door.
It opened only from the inside, and according to a prominent sign opening it would trip the fire alarm, but according to Delphi a clever programmer had long ago disabled the alarm circuit so that the staff could use it as a convenient shortcut to the hot-dog truck that parked in the lot around lunchtime. During the day it was propped open with half a cinderblock. At night it was locked, so I waited in the car for a few minutes until I saw Delphi wave me inside.
Not exactly Mission Impossible, I know. But it's a lot safer, and besides you wouldn't believe how filthy you can get crawling through ventilation ducts. Our first stop was Delphi's office, where she spent a few minutes reinstating Sarah's access to the network.
John Golden: Freelance Debugger Page 4