I set the ancient phone on the table in front of me and shove one of the hard plastic buds into my ear. “Why can’t she see you?”
“Hey, what did the hat say to the tie?”
“No more jokes, Grant. Why can’t anyone else see you?”
He lets out a sad sigh. “Because I’m nothing more than a little bit of leftover code floating around in this very complicated program. Ghost code.”
I don’t know what I thought the explanation would be, but that certainly wasn’t it. My brain stutters and then locks onto a single thought. “Ghost in the machine.”
“What?”
I frown at his confused expression. “I thought you said you were a hacker?”
“Well, I lied. Sue me.” He shrugs, kicking his feet up on another empty chair without moving it at all. “What’s this machine ghost?”
“Ghost in the machine. It’s the idea that a little bit of random code can somehow rearrange itself due to constant inputs, until it creates a more cohesive code that can actually impact the existing code on a computer, altering the files.”
Grant sits up and drops his feet silently back to the floor. “Okay, I think I followed that. Is it real?”
Now it’s my turn to shrug. “Who knows? Plenty of people have tried to test it, but all the results are fuzzy. Now it’s just the stuff of late night dark web chat rooms.”
The waitress floats back over, setting my cup gently on the table. She glances at my ear bud and mouths, “Do you need anything else?”
I give her a little half grin and shake my head, sending her bouncing over to another table.
“Okay, but let’s back up a minute. If you’re some kind of ghost code, are you trying to tell me that this,” I spread my arms out to indicate the room, “is some kind of simulation?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“You’re more batshit crazy than I thought.” I sip the dark brew and let the bitter warmth fight off the chill creeping into my gut.
“Really?” Grant quirks one eyebrow up into his dark hair. “This from the girl talking to an invisible boy.”
“There’s no such thing. Maybe I’m losing it. Maybe the meds they gave me fried my brain cells, and I’m slowly going insane. Maybe this is all some elaborate practical joke, and I just have to wait for someone to jump out and yell “surprise.”
“Did you check your closet?”
A chill runs down my back at the memory of all those identical black shirts. “My mom knows this is my favorite shirt. She thought I was dying. Maybe grief made her do weird things with my wardrobe.”
“Take a look at the parking lot.”
I stare through the giant plate glass window and sip my coffee again. “What am I looking at?”
“How many red cars do you see?”
I scan the small lot. Small black sedans as far as the eye can see. I dart my eyes at the horde of traffic zooming down the street. Every passing car is a small black sedan. I set the coffee mug on the table before I spill it all over myself.
“Why did you enter the VALR program?” Grant’s voice is barely more than a whisper.
“I was dying.” The words come out automatically, devoid of emotion. “There were no more options to treat the cancer. It was going to kill me anyway.”
“Let me guess. They found a magic cocktail while you were in the coma, and now you’re miraculously cured.”
I stare at him. His almond eyes are soft, almost pitying. I want to slap the sappy expression off his face, but I don’t. Instead I nod, because it’s the truth. Or I thought it was.
“How long were you sick?”
“Twelve years.” Twelve long years of chemo, radiation, pricks, and prods. Over a decade of living in hospitals. Of staying inside, tucked in my dark room because the germs of normal, healthy people were more than my body could handle. Twelve years of doctor visits, last tries, and infuriating test results.
“But they found a cure that wiped out every molecule of cancer from your body in a few weeks?”
“Don’t you dare.” My voice quivers on the final word, but I suck in a deep gush of air to steady myself. My stomach rolls, and saliva fills my mouth. I’m going to be sick if I’m not careful. My next words come out cold as ice. “I don’t know who you are or who sent you. I have no idea what kind of sick bastard would think this is funny, but I assure you, I do not.”
I stand up, drain the rest of my coffee, and hitch my bag up onto my shoulder.
“This isn’t a joke.”
I close my eyes, clenching and opening my fists as a reminder not to punch him. “I’m leaving. Don’t follow me. In fact, don’t ever talk to me again.” I don’t wait for his response, pushing through the growing crowd and back outside. I push open the door and come inches from barreling into a tall, blond guy trying to get in. Social grace was never my strong suit, so no need to start now. I mutter an apology and march to the truck, my head down, fingers digging into the canvas strap of my bag.
Once I climb into the familiar cab, my breathing slows, and I can stop imagining my heart beating its way through my rib cage. My fingers run over the steering wheel, seeking out the tiny dings and scratches that ground me in my seat. This is my reality. This is real. It has to be.
C:>NINE.exe
The drive home is like being inside the set of a movie studio. The west Texas sun seems a little too bright, the grass too green, the sky too blue. Even the traffic moves in an easy pattern, cars all flowing in their neat little lanes, stopping and going like well-trained synchronized swimmers. Everything feels real. But almost too real, like a nearly perfect forgery. Like how I used to smile brightly at the nurses with my teeth clenched together so they would go away and stop offering to make me more comfortable, the hospital code word for zoned out on drugs.
I slip into the front door of the cozy house I’ve lived in my entire life. The normalcy sweeps over me, and doubts start to ebb away. No virtual reality could ever compare to home.
“There you are, mija. Did you get everything worked out with your program?” Mom sweeps into the living room, her hands loaded with another can of Coke and a plate of food. She sets them on the little wooden coffee table and pats the couch next to her.
“I’m not really hungry, Mama.”
She pats the couch again. “Too bad. You’ve barely eaten anything since you’ve been home. Sit. Eat.”
I sit next to her and rub a careless hand over the floral print of the couch. Just as threadbare as ever. Except the one spot on the end. Daddy’s spot. It’s barely touched, evidence of the unspoken agreement between Mom and I that neither of us can sit there. I breathe a little easier. No programmer in the world could know those kinds of details.
The tamales are just as flavorless as they were my first day home, and the chug of Coke to wash them down is as bitter as my coffee from earlier. Damn chemo drugs. I take another few bites just to make Mama happy. She watches me scoop each forkful into my mouth, and I can practically hear her mentally calculating the calories I’ve gotten down.
I want to tell her that she can stop worrying about my food intake. I don’t have to worry about the drugs sending half of it back up. But twelve years of habit will be hard to break. I get down half the plate before I have to push it away.
Mama sits back in her spot, satisfied with my consumption for now. “Tell me about the program you’re working on?”
I wipe my mouth and shoot her a quick side glance. “Since when do you want to hear about my programming?”
“Since you came home cancer-free and I am allowed to start dreaming about your future again.”
My future. It’s not something I ever gave much thought to. When you fall out of remission more times than you can count, you stop making plans more than a few months ahead. I gave up on the idea of living past twenty a long time ago.
“You know. Now that you’re better, you might want to think about college.”
“Ha!” The laugh rolls out of me, and it feels g
ood. “Did you win the lottery while I was asleep?”
“Yes,” she tells me, completely straight-faced. “I was also elected President. We’ll be moving to the White House next week. Of course, now we’ll have to get a damn dog because, for some reason, everyone looks more presidential with some goofy faced hound following them into Air Force One.”
And now I’m really laughing. My head tilts back, eyes closed, arms wrapped around my belly, and tears leak down my face. “But you hate dogs,” I choke out between my laughs.
“That’s the price of being the leader of the free world.”
I dash away the wetness from my cheeks and smile over at Mom. She’s sitting prim and proper on the edge of the couch, giving me the cheekiest grin I’ve ever seen. I lean over and wrap her in a hug to rival all hugs. Every kid in the world claims their mom dishes out the best hugs, but that’s only because those kids have never had the good fortune to hug my mom. She wraps me up, and I bury my face into the crook of her neck, smelling up the combination of mint toothpaste, gardenia perfume, and enchilada sauce that is uniquely my mother.
Mama pulls back, pushing away a strand of dark hair from my face. “You’re allowed to dream, mija. Whatever you want to do, you can do it.”
“Thanks, Mama.” And I mean it. It’s been so long since I had any dreams, I’ve forgotten what it’s like to give myself permission to think about tomorrow.
“So, Viviana, what do you want to do?”
I stiffen in her arms. Not once in my entire eighteen years of life has my mother ever called me Viviana without quickly following it with Mariposa Maria Quiroga. She always told me the story of how she fought Daddy on naming me Viviana. How he wanted to honor his late grandmother and how she thought it sounded like a name for some snooty, rich person at the fancy clubs we could never afford to join. In the end, she conceded under the sole condition that except for rare circumstances—essentially those involving a looming punishment—they would only call me Viv.
And they did. I didn’t even know my name was Viviana until the first day of school when the teacher had to say my name three times before I raised my hand.
I stare into her brown eyes, and they shine back at me. Too shiny. Like the sun, and the grass, and the sky. I swallow back the food threatening to make a return appearance. Mama stares at me, her eyes wide, waiting on me to lay claim to a future I was so sure I had just a few seconds ago.
“Maybe I’ll check with VALR; see if they have any programming positions available.”
Mama smiles at me, too wide, punching a hole right into the middle of my chest. “That’s a wonderful idea, mija.”
I pull back out of her reach a bit. “I think I’ll go over there right now.” I plaster on my fake smile. “Go get a jump start on that future.”
Without waiting for a response, I turn around, grab my bag and truck keys, and sprint out the front door.
C:>TEN.exe
I don’t really have any intention of getting a job at VALR, but I’m already pulling into the parking lot and cutting the engine by the time I realize where I’ve been driving. My brain keeps turning over Grant’s words; if he’s the Ghost in the Machine, then what am I? Everyone can see me, hear me, and touch me. I pound the heels of my hands against the steering wheel, eliciting a sad whine from the horn. None of this makes sense. It’s like someone is trying to insert a line of web font color code into an intricate database mining hack. The text color just sits there, not impacting the hack, but definitely disturbing the flow of the code. Grant is like an html code for bright orange, comic sans.
The truck cab is stuffy in the late afternoon heat. I need to get out and walk, move around. Whenever I get stuck in the middle of a complex code, it helps to pace and talk it out. I jump out, slamming the door behind me. I pace down the row of non-descript black sedans and mutter out a list of what I know.
“Some details are precise, like the notches on my steering wheel, and some are off like the color of the sky. Everyone still remembers me.” I pause and spin on my heel, marching in the opposite direction. “But I still only talk to two people, so that’s not saying much. And my senses are off. Most food tastes bland, but Mama still smells exactly the same…except she called me Viviana.”
“Do you always walk around parking lots talking to yourself?”
Grant. Anger roars through me, paired with a heavy sadness.
“I said I never wanted to see you again.”
“Yeah, I know. I figured after you had time to cool off and think about it, you might think differently.”
“I don’t know what I think.” I spin again and march in the other direction.
“I can help you, Butterfly. I can show you the answers to all those questions you keep asking yourself.”
I turn again and storm toward him. “What questions?”
His eyes darken and he drops his voice to the soft tone the doctors used when they told me they’d run out of treatment options. “Am I losing my mind? Did the drugs they give me screw up my head? Am I just paranoid and wasting this second chance?” He looks past me, over my shoulder, and then meets my eyes again. “What if Grant is telling the truth?”
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. The kind the nurses were always trying to get me to take when the pain got to be too much and my brain tried to check out. I’m not ready to believe everything Grant says, but I can’t deny that he’s right about my questions. “Show me.”
“We need to get to a secure workstation inside the VALR building. It doesn’t have to be in the security room, but it needs to have access to the system.”
“Why the VALR building?”
Grant stares at me, still with the serious face that makes me wish he’d tell a corny joke instead. “It’s the last place where you know for sure you were you.”
I don’t know how he knows that, and right now I don’t care because he’s right. In those moments before the meds took me under, I was one hundred percent certain of who I was and the reality of the world around me. I stare up at the metal and glass building looming at the other end of the parking lot.
“So how are we sneaking in?”
“As long as you open the door for me, I’m undetectable. One of the few benefits of no one knowing you exist. You, however, could never sneak in. This place is like a fortress. You’ll need to come up with something to sweet-talk your way in.”
I bite back an ugly response. “I don’t do sweet-talk.”
“Well, you better learn. This place closes in half an hour, and that’s barely enough time for what we need.”
“Fine.” I spit the word out between clenched teeth and head toward the door. Sweet-talking himself into an off-limits building is something Papa could have done with one arm tied behind his back. There wasn’t a soul alive who didn’t love him or could resist his infectious smile and natural charm. I inherited exactly zero percent of his people skills.
I push open the door and hold it so Grant and I can slip into the nearly deserted lobby. Only a solitary guard sits behind the reception counter.
“Ms. Quiroga, I didn’t think we’d see you again today.
I part my lips and attempt to smile convincingly at the guard. “No, I’m not due again for another week, but I had to come back. I…” I spin through my brain searching for an excuse to be in the building. “I left things…poorly with Dr. Spencer.” With the idea latching on, my voice gets a bit more confident. “The truth is, I was a real bitch to her earlier today, and it’s going to eat me up inside unless I can apologize and make things better.”
Grant snorts beside me. “Smooth.”
The guard gives me a sympathetic grin. “I understand. She hasn’t left yet, so if you hurry, you should still be able to catch her in her office.”
I give him a real smile this time, immeasurably pleased with myself for successfully navigating a social situation without resorting to name calling or a shouting match. “Thank you.” Jogging to the bank of elevators, I hit the button and smile again w
hen the doors spread open right away.
Grant jumps into the plush rectangular box, and I’m right behind him. “Go to the third floor.”
I hit the button and use the short travel time to calm down my racing pulse. The ride up isn’t nearly long enough. The second the doors open, Grant sprints into the open office space, and I run to follow him. He fishtails between the cubicles into a back corner of the floor where the lights are already out.
“Okay, pick a cubicle and let’s get to work. We don’t have long. If Dr. Spencer makes it downstairs before we do, that guard is going to know you aren’t here for an apology.”
I pull out a high-end ergonomic chair and boot up the monitor. “Okay, what am I doing?”
“You need to hack into the security system cameras.”
I lace my fingers together and stretch my arms in front of me, palms out. I know it reeks of every cliché hacker movie out there, but it’s a cliché for a reason. The movement calms my nerves and puts my brain into hacker mode.
Dispensing with the off-the-shelf operating system, I dig deeper into the computer’s brain and access the network drives that connect this computer to all the others on the system. As the code scrolls past the screen, my heart rate regulates in a way that deep breathing could never achieve. Code is my yoga. My fingers work the keyboard, dismissing the systems I don’t need in search of the one that will reveal the security system. It’s taking longer than it should.
“What the hell?” My fingers freeze as I realize why I haven’t found the system yet.
“What is it? Is it…what do you call it? Encrypted?”
“No…I mean yes, of course the system is encrypted, but that’s not the problem. It’s like there are two networks nestled on top of each other, and I can’t figure out why.”
“Can you crack it?”
I shoot Grant a glare. “This isn’t a bank heist, Ronald McDonald. I’m not cracking anything. And of course I can. I’ve yet to meet a system that could keep me out.”
“Ronald McDonald?”
Ghost Code Page 5