by Ray Daniel
Runway:
Tron: What? What? What do you want?
Runway: Nothing. Just seeing if you were doing anything.
Tron: Watching porn.
Runway: Any good?
Tron: Meh.
NotAGirl: Rosetta just signed on!
Runway: Who’s Rosetta?
NotAGirl: You are such a newfag.
Epomis: He wrote the Nappy Time Virus
One little virus, and you’re infamous.
Epomis: Hey Rosetta.
Busted. So much for stalking.
Rosetta: Hey.
Epomis: You haven’t been around for years.
Runway: He’s gotta talk to someone about porn.
Tron: Ha!
I sent Runway a private message.
Rosetta
Runway
Rosetta
Runway
Rosetta
Runway
Rosetta
My cell phone rang.
What the hell?
The evening had gotten away from me. It was eleven, and my glass had somehow emptied itself again. I answered the phone, left it on speaker so I could type. “Do you know what time it is?” I asked.
Bobby Miller said, “Yeah, it’s eleven.”
“What time zone are you in?”
“Boston.”
“Then what the hell are you doing calling me at eleven?”
“I don’t know. What the hell are you doing poking around on the Anonymous server?”
I glanced at my screen. Runway had not answered me. “How did you know?”
“Mel told me.”
“Mel? You mean Special Agent Hunter? How did she know? Are you guys spying on me?”
“No, we’re not spying on you.”
“Really? Because creepy phone calls in the middle of the night suggest that you’re spying on me.”
“Listen, Rosetta—”
“See? See, that. That’s spying. You just doxed me.”
“I didn’t dox you. If I was going to dox you, I’d put your contact information all over the Internet.”
“How did you guess my nickname?”
“You’ve had that nickname for years.”
“How did you know that?”
“Mel.”
I need to figure out Special Agent Hunter.
Bobby continued. “In fact, she says that ‘Rosetta’ should keep a low profile. Something about some invaded web servers?”
“That was years ago, Bobby.”
“Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just repeating what I heard.”
“Why are you watching me?”
“Just get off the server.”
Runway
Rosetta
Runway
Rosetta
Runway
Bobby repeated, “Tucker, get off the server.”
“I’m busy.”
“Get off now. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
Runway
Rosetta
I said, “Bobby, I’m not getting off the server until this asshole admits what he did to Maria.”
“Whoa, whoa. What asshole?”
“Runway. The asshole who hacked Maria.”
“Trust me and get off that server now, or I can’t help you!”
I’d never heard Bobby sound desperate.
Rosetta
I moved the mouse up and pointed at the little window-closing X.
Runway
I told Bobby, “All right, I’m off. You happy?”
Bobby said, “You’re shouting.”
“I’m on a speakerphone.”
“You’re drunk.”
“That too.”
“Let’s talk tomorrow. Mel and I will buy you dinner.”
“Not breakfast?”
“Go sleep it off. I don’t want to watch your hangover.” He broke the connection.
Sleep it off.
Going to bed at a reasonable hour is not sleeping it off. It’s just going to bed. And there would be no hangover; just sleep until about ten and it works out. I abluted and hit the sack.
My alarm went off at 6:30 a.m., hangover clanging in my skull.
I had to go watch Maria.
Fourteen
Maria stood next to me, squinting up at the spire of the tall building. The Uber car drove off toward Storrow Drive while I gave the driver five stars from my phone. The hangover had finally subsided to an ignorable background buzzing.
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s the Museum of Science!” I said, flourishing my hands. “Ta-da!”
“Looks boring,” said Maria.
I frowned and walked past a huge chunk of granite and around a hexagonal pile of basalt. “C’mon.”
Maria looked up at the spire, then after the Uber car.
I stopped. Waved an impatient wave. “C’mon, let’s go.”
Maria slumped her shoulders, stomped in my direction. “This is going to be boring.”
I sat on a petrified log, patted the spot next to me. “We need to talk.”
Maria stood eyeing the log and blocking the path, forcing a hook-nosed guy in a suit to skip around her to avoid knocking her over.
“Sorry,” I said to the suit. “Maria, say you’re sorry. Get out of the way.”
“Sorry,” muttered Maria, climbing onto the boulder.
“Look, I’m not taking you to my favorite museum if you’re going to be a pill all day.”
“This is your favorite museum?”
“Yes. My dad used to take me here a couple times a year.”
“Why?”
“He liked science. He wanted me to like it too.”
“And you want me to like it? Sounds boring.”
“It gave me time to talk with my dad. I didn’t see him much.”
“Auntie Adriana says he was a terrible person.”
Ouch.
“It’s complicated,” I said. “It’s always complicated.”
“Did he make you look at these rocks?”
“He didn’t make me do anything, though I have a picture of him and me sitting on this one. It wasn’t my favorite thing at the museum, but I liked it.”
“What was your favorite?”
“I could show you.”
“Okay.”
Maria hopped off the petrified log and headed for the museum entrance. We stepped into the lobby, a vaulted combination of granite and glass sporting banners that exhorted us to innovate and transform. Model airplanes hung overhead while the names and dates of scientists from Archimedes to Pavlov adorned three-story granite slabs.
I operated a kiosk, got us tickets to the museum and a couple of special exhibits, then got in line behind the guy in the suit to show our tickets and get our hands stamped. Ahead, through an enormous plate-glass window, the Charles River twinkled in the April sun while duck boats plied its waters.
“Let’s go to your favorite place,” said Maria.
“You don’t want to go to a favorite place right away,” I said. “You want something to look forward to.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“C’mon, I’ll show you something embarrassing instead.”
We entered the Blue Wing, which I still thought of as the West Wing
. A long rectangular building with a three-story open floor plan, the Blue Wing presented live science shows, exhibits on modeling, and on the bottom floor, an exhibit on the history of computers.
Maria pointed at a hulking cabinet. “What’s that?”
The sign read VAX-11/780.
“That is a computer from a long time ago,” I said. “It wasn’t even as powerful as your iPad.”
“What did they do with it? Go on the Internet?”
“There was no Internet.”
“Then what did it do?”
“A lot of calculations. It could play games like tic-tac-toe.”
“That’s lame. Is that what you said was embarrassing?”
“No,” I said, approaching a glass case. “This is embarrassing.”
The case contained a single plastic three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk, the reason we’d come to the museum. I hoped that the floppy would build trust between Maria and me. I’d share a secret with her, and maybe she’d feel comfortable talking to me about her world. The sweet girl I’d known for years had turned into a bullying machine in the past year. The reason was obvious: her parents were gone. But I needed her to talk to me if she was going to get past it. This floppy disk was the key.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“It’s a floppy disk.”
“It looks like a save button.”
“Yeah. That’s where you saved your work back when we had floppy disks.”
“Not on a flash drive?”
“They didn’t have flash drives back then.”
“And that’s what’s embarrassing?”
“No. You have to read the sign.”
Maria read, “A floppy disk containing the Nappy Time Virus.”
“Yup.”
“What’s that?”
“Read some more.”
Maria read that the Nappy Time Virus brought down a big chunk of computers on the Internet.
“Who’s Rosetta?” she asked. “It says someone named Rosetta wrote the virus. Rosetta sounds bad.”
“He wasn’t bad,” I said. “He made a mistake.”
“Did they catch him?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know?”
I knelt next to Maria. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Yeah?”
“A real secret. A secret that you can’t tell anyone, not even your friends.”
“Can I tell Adriana and Catherine?”
“Yes. They know the secret.” Or at least Adriana did.
“What’s the secret?”
I leaned close to whisper into Maria’s ear, looked over her shoulder. Saw the guy in the suit, the one who had almost tripped over her—same hooked nose—standing on the other side of a gigantic tire trying to be inconspicuous, trying not to show that he was peeking through the center of the tire and looking at us.
“What secret?” Maria asked again.
I stood. He ducked back behind the tire. I took hold of Maria’s hand.
Maria pulled her hand free. “You were going to tell me a secret.”
I crouched down again to whisper in Maria’s ear, and to keep an eye on Hook Nose. He walked from behind the tire, studiously examining the dinosaur exhibit on his way toward the exit.
“Here’s the secret,” I whispered. “I am Rosetta.”
Maria squealed, “You are?”
Everybody in the Blue Wing turned and looked toward the source of the sound.
“Shh! It’s a secret, remember?”
“How did you write it?”
“It’s complicated. But remember, you can never tell anyone that I’m Rosetta.”
“Why not?”
“It’s impolite to tell secrets.”
I looked up and around. Hook Nose was nowhere in sight. The adrenaline that had surged when I realized we were being followed sloshed around, nestled in my lower brain, and turned into anger. I considered options. My instinct was to wander around until I saw this guy, chase him down, confront him—all impossible with Maria in tow. Another option was to ignore him. He didn’t want to be seen and would probably just stay hidden and follow us. He’d report back that we were at the museum.
We had a third option.
“You know what?” I told Maria. “Let’s go see my favorite thing.”
“Okay.”
We left the Blue Wing, passing a model of a gigantic mosquito and a kinetic sculpture that clanged as balls rolled down tracks and fell through space.
I led Maria to the base of a spiral staircase, and took the staircase to the lobby. I caught Hook Nose scurrying out of sight around a corner toward an exhibit of stuffed animals. Led Maria toward the exhibit, knowing that Hook Nose was trapped. I found him, his back turned to me as he carefully examined a moose at the end of the cul-de-sac of exhibits.
I pointed at a model of Earth to distract Maria. “Pretty big globe!”
“Is that your favorite thing?”
“No.”
“Good.”
I led Maria up stone steps under a fossil of an ichthyosaur to reach the second level. I could have taken the elevator, but we would have been harder to follow. I could have taken Maria to see the tamarins, sure that she would have marveled at their little faces and hands. Maybe I would, after I’d sprung my trap. Instead, I continued to climb, saying loudly, “It’s on the third floor!”
There was little on the third floor. We reached the level, turned, and walked into the library, a large, wide room filled with books and reading tables, all lit by plate-glass windows that looked over the Back Bay, providing the city’s best view of that landfilled wonder of the nineteenth century.
“Here we are,” I said to Maria, pointing at my favorite thing.
“Bees?”
We sat behind a rectangular glassed-in beehive. Inside the glass, a vibrating world of bees churned across a narrow honeycomb, feeding young, cleaning cells, and attending to the queen. I pointed out a small window where the hive connected to the outside world.
“You can see them coming and going out here.”
Maria watched them for a moment. “Is this really your favorite thing?”
“Yes,” I said. It actually was. I also liked that it hid us from the library’s front door.
“What are they doing?” Maria asked.
I pointed at a bee dancing near the entrance. “That one has found some flowers.”
“How do you know?”
“The dance, it tells—”
Hook Nose walked past us quickly, searching for us in the library. I stood, stepped in behind him.
He saw me at the last instant. Spun.
“You suck at this,” I said. “Worst tail ever.”
I had no plan for what he would do next. The library was empty. It was always empty; that was one of the reasons I’d led him here. I didn’t want a big public spectacle, a chase through the museum, or easy access to backup. I wanted to talk where his handler, if he had one, wouldn’t see us do it. I expected him to sputter, to claim ignorance, to threaten to call the police. I didn’t expect what he actually did.
“Why are you following us?” I asked.
Hook Nose raised his hands to my chest and shoved me hard, back toward Maria. She screamed as I caught myself and pirouetted around her. Then, while I was trying not to crush Maria, he ran out through the library door, down the steps, and was gone.
Fifteen
Maria and I returned to the Cleveland Place apartment, closed the door, looked at each other, sighed, and went about our business. She to her room, me to the kitchen. I fired up my laptop and poured myself a glass of wine.
I considered calling my friend Jael, a good friend, private investigator, and retired Mossad assassin, in that order. But calling Jael and saying, “Some guys were following us” i
s akin to saying, “Unleash the kraken,” and I wasn’t quite sure it was time to activate that side of Jael. The guy seemed harmless enough, and unusually inept.
I drank my wine, checked Twitter, and saw several new followers. I had no idea why anyone followed me. All I did was wander through life and share the occasional observation. I scrolled through the list of new followers, filtering out the ones that promised me ten thousand new followers for six dollars (not really wanting followers all that much). I followed back the ones who were real. One popped out: @PwnSec.
Really. Looks like I got someone’s attention.
I clicked on the little icon and followed @PwnSec back.
Following someone allows them to send you a private direct message. Usually this results in you getting some ridiculous machine-generated drivel thanking you for the follow: “Thank you so much for the follow, I look forward to hours of fun and mutual enlightenment as we dialog … buy my music and/or book.” But in this case, the direct message I got was a little more precise:
@PwnSec
Interesting. I replied.
@TuckerInBoston
@PwnSec
@TuckerInBoston
It probably wasn’t the response they were expecting. Popular culture has turned hackers into omniscient and unstoppable demons, the windigos of the Internet. The pros can do some damage. This bunch of kids could not.
Their attack came pretty quickly on my Twitter feed.
@PwnSec: We announce that @TuckerInBoston is really Rosetta. #doxed
The response was just as quick.
@Epomis: Hey @Pwnsec. No shit, Sherlock. #doxed #lame
At least I had one person on my side.
I was about to follow @Epomis when the door to the condo opened.
“Tucker, I’m home!” Adriana called through the house.
I walked to the kitchen doorway and saw Maria’s bedroom door open. Maria flew out, wrapping her arms around Adriana.
“We went to the Museum of Science!” Maria said.
“That’s wonderful,” said Adriana, pulling off her jacket and hanging it on the coat hook.
“And a man followed us, but Tucker fought him off.”
Adriana looked at me, eyes going from wide and happy to narrow and angry. “What?”