by Eddie Saint
Slooop! The sticky pad on the end of his tongue, travelling at incredible speed, hit its mark. Bingo!
Only… something wasn’t quite right. A lazy black fly drifted past his eyes and made its way safely into a cubicle. At just the same time the taste sensations from the sticky pad made their unwelcome way up to Toad’s brain: cigar ash, toad urine, disinfectant. His shoulders slumped, and he sighed.
‘One more week and I can retire to my caravan,’ he thought to himself. ‘One more week…’
When you need to go into hiding, there’s no point doing it in half measures, like an ostrich. You really need to wipe your tail feathers off the face of the map.
After I triggered those alarms hacking into the Wild Wood Security Service, The Ends was about the safest place I could find. Sure, it was home to a shady crew of petty criminals, but once they saw that Mother had taken me under her wing it was like getting a royal seal of approval. From that moment on I had eyes and ears everywhere, a red-hot early warning system if anyone from up river started getting too close.
Even with Mother’s seal of approval I couldn’t just freeload though. Everyone in The Ends has something to give back. Turns out being able to hack a phone so it stays off grid is a Grade A skill around these parts. Who knew?
Anyway, The Ends was just my ‘real life’ hideaway.
I had to wipe my whole digital self too. Drastic, I know, but not as bad as getting tracked down online. No point leading the Jack Russells right to my warren entrance, eh?
So, when I opened my laptop that sunny morning and saw an email waiting for me it gave me quite a shock. Not least because I no longer have any e-mail accounts.
The message was short.
To: Jay J Cottontail
Subject: Hornworm
Hi JJ,
I’ve got something I know you’ll like. It’s big. Bigger than anything you’ve seen before.
Meet me.
T.
So I freaked. Well, wouldn’t you?
I stared at the words on my screen for some seconds, willing them to make sense. I had no idea who ‘T’ could be, or what ‘Hornworm’ meant, and as for ‘meet me’? How was I supposed to do that, even if I wanted to?
I realised that, looked at in a certain way, the e-mail sounded a bit pervy, so I did a bit of rummaging in the code to see what it could tell me. I don’t know how deep your computer skills go, but mine are pretty hot, and let me tell you: there’s only so many ways you can get an e-mail to appear on someone else’s computer uninvited, and Dug had taught me how to unmask them all.
Except one, it transpired.
I let that ride. At least it meant I was dealing with a pro, not some creepy bedroom cowboy who had downloaded a book of hack skills and got lucky. Not very comforting, but any knowledge is better than none, I guess.
The message itself was giving me nothing. It came with an attachment, but I’m too smart to open things I’m not sure about, so all in all it seemed like I’d have to just stick it in spam and forget about it. Except…
The knowledge that someone had been smart enough to send me an e-mail when I don’t have an account, and had managed to cloak their trail so I couldn’t follow them back… that all said I should take it seriously. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more worried it made me. This was someone who knew all of Dug’s tricks and then some. At the very least that made ‘T’ a spy, or worse.
As a journalist I’ve had a lot of success trusting my nose, and what my whiskers were telling me was that, whichever way I looked at it, the ‘Hornworm’ message was bad news.
So I figured I had three options: ignore it; hide; or run. As it turned out, there was a fourth…
IVAN THE FAIRY tapped out a short message on his keyboard and sent it out into the ether.
While he waited for a response he contemplated the day he was having and decided that, since he’d had many strokes of luck once the clang of the bell had woken him early, today was almost a happy day.
He had not had his breakfast spat in, no chair that he had sat on had been whisked away from him at the last moment, no one had made fun of his size, or his weight, or his calliper. He had even got to sit in one of the best seats in the Computer Room, only two rows from the radiator, for the best part of the afternoon. He weighed those strokes of luck against the two biggest burdens that were his daily affliction and decided that, on balance, this was indeed, almost a happy day.
New recruits in the Fox Special Force got to choose their code name. It could be anything. It was their one chance to personalise the experience. They got to shout it out in the Naming Parade and then that was their new Army name forever. He had chosen ‘Ivan’, after the author of the book his uncle had given him when he started. And everyone knew that an ‘Ivan’ had to have a ‘the…’ after it.
He had weighed up his options for the final name. ‘Terrible’ had a certain menacing quality to it, but it had already been taken. ‘Scary’ was still up for grabs though.
‘Ivan the Scary.’ He had run the name around in his head. He liked it. It was a real soldier’s name. But something wasn’t quite right with it. He couldn’t help but wonder: was it really him? He was more about playing by the rules. Root out a transgressor and confront them with the full weight of the Rule Book. Yes, that was more his style. Maybe he could be ‘Ivan the Fair’? But then again, wasn’t soldier training all about improving yourself? If he thought of himself as ‘Scary’ then maybe, one day, that was what he would become.
On the morning of the Naming Parade he was still undecided which way to go with the whole name thing. ‘Scary’ or ‘Fair’? ‘Fair’ or ‘Scary’? Even when it came to his row’s turn and the new recruits to his left began calling out their new names, one after the other, Ivan was still unable to pin down his favoured option. It was a big decision. Whatever he shouted out he’d be stuck with forever.
No amount of pleading with the boss in a private meeting after the dust had settled on the Naming Parade would make him bend the rules and let Ivan change his selection. ‘Can’t have one rule for my nephew and another for the rest,’ his uncle had said. ‘Fair’s fairy.’
And that shines a light on Ivan the Fairy’s second burden. When your uncle is also the President you sometimes get preferential treatment, although it is not always the sort you might want. In that place it just meant he had to work harder to earn respect.
He sat back in his almost warm seat and waited for a reply to his message. To pass the time he took out the book his uncle had given to all the new recruits: ‘Play to Win’ by Ivan the Whys. (As a philosopher, Ivan the Whys was always asking questions, and his most common question was, ‘Why?’ During his early adult years this used to annoy a lot of folks back in his village, who thought that at some point the answer ‘Just because!’ should suffice. It would certainly mean they’d then get another pair of paws helping to bring the harvest in.)
Ivan turned to page one and began to read…
WHILE I WAS considering my options vis a vis getting a million miles away from whoever or whatever ‘Hornworm’ and ‘T’ were, a second blow landed. Pinging onto my desktop came a ‘Friend Request’ for the RootShoot account I hadn’t used much in school and never since. That morning I swear it was like my laptop had turned against me.
Confession Number Two: I haven’t got much willpower. Yes, I know it was just a little red area of pixels on my screen, but it looked so enticingly clickable. Despite the business with the Hornworm message, I’m not sure I could have resisted that red dot’s addictive charms. Not then. Not ever. I took a step closer to it by opening up RootShoot, and there it was again, like I knew it would be, glaring at me from the home screen, daring me to click it.
‘Bog off!’ I said to the red dot, but it didn’t.
This is maybe a good time to get Confession Number 3 off my chest. I used to be a real potty mouth. Pretty much every adjective I used was a swearword. Mother made me give it up though. Told me grown-ups didn’t need to sw
ear, especially ones who want to make a living writing words. It’s a condition of staying with her. I try.
That red dot just stared at me, goading me to step back into my old life. There was no way I was going to. I had closed the door on my old digital life, and a butterfly can’t crawl back into a chrysalis, right? But it did intrigue me…
‘Everything ok?’ said Mother, delivering another milky coffee. She has a habit of turning up at times of difficulty or emotional crisis. You get used to it.
I gave a quick smile, but the tension in my face stopped it sticking around.
‘Um…ta,’ was all I managed. Quite the conversationalist.
Mother nodded and smiled then skated back across the room, picking up empties as she went. She knew better than to interfere with my headstrong bid for independence.
I breathed in.
I breathed out.
And in…
And out…
Then I made a decision.
‘It can’t do any harm just to see who it is,’ I convinced myself, and gave in to that naughty red dot’s addictive charms.
The name that came up was a genuine killer:
‘Buck Wildheart?’
I mean, was that even real? I ran it around in my head, trying to remember seeing him sitting at a school desk. Nothing rang any bells. I’d like to think I’d remember a name like that. Three months isn’t really that long.
I let the request slide. You get some wild characters trying their luck sometimes, and I reckon I was born suspicious. Either way, I figured, since I actually had RootShoot open for the first time in a bazillion weeks, it wouldn’t do any harm to snoop on my old school friends. I had cut all ties with my ‘up river’ life, but a part of me quite liked the idea of trying on that old skin and imagining what life would have been like if I’d stayed. I wasn’t going to join in, obviously, just drift through their conversations, like a ghost.
I tracked down some of my old friends discussing a sci-fi convention.
LENNY: Hey, maybe when we get there we can hit the Carrington 5ive stand?
ALEX: ‘Carrington 5ive, we’re losing contact. You are on your own. Say hello to the universe for us…’
LENNY: Da-DA-da-da-DAAAA!
JENNY: Top, top show that, guys! I’m with Lenny. Let’s do that first.
LENNY: Hey, talking of ‘losing contact’, what ever happened to Jay’s brother Dug? He was the first to get me into C5ive.
JENNY: Or Jay, come to think of it???
I have to admit, it was a bit of a shocker seeing my name come up on the screen. It made my nose twitch, and not because there was something on the breeze, but because, inside, it felt like little pin pricks were jabbing my nostrils. Then the screen blurred slightly, and when I blinked a tear rolled down one cheek. Soppy or what? (That’s Confession Number Four, I guess). It caught me totally by surprise but I have to say it was one of the loveliest feelings I’d had since I’d left the old place: they remembered me. Maybe I’m not as emotionally bullet proof as I like to think I am.
When I got back to the screen they had moved on from old sci-fi fan chat.
ALEX: Didn’t they both go down river?
LENNY: Not sure.
JENNY: Hey, what about Gilmore? Where did she get to?
I stayed with the conversation for a while longer as they moved on to other former classmates at Potts Farm School: Gilmore with the gammy leg; Trotter and his bassoon; Blaze and her practical jokes. I lapped it all up. It felt almost as good as soaking up the warm sun. It even took my mind off the mysterious Hornworm for a while.
It didn’t, however, banish the ridiculously named Buck Wildheart from my thoughts. After hearing all those names from my recent past, surely one of them should have helped pull Buck out of my memory. But no. There was a big fat zero on that score. I was still suspicious of him but, and here I refer you back to ‘Confession Number Two’, I did feel the need to find out more about him. I decided to take it to the next level…
Opening his profile it was apparent that Buck had certainly done well for himself, in one sense at least. He did not come across as a shy Dog, starring as he was in a dozen photos, each one a variation on the theme of showing his ripped, canine physique to some glamorous, if underdressed, creature. His recent posts were interesting too. All in favour of the Dogs’ new President.
At least that made it all clear. ‘Buck’ was a fake account. It was one of the first things Dug had taught me, in a lesson that could have been entitled ‘How to spot the bots: LESSON ONE - Pictures and Posts.’ Buck’s ‘Friend Request’ was just spam. The hunk in the pictures was real, somewhere, but whoever made the profile had just lifted some pictures off the web and chosen a cool name. Chances were, if you could trace the creature tapping away on Buck’s keyboard they’d turn out to be Mountain Goat, or Pole Cat or, most likely, Fox.
At that point I relaxed. Buck wasn’t some old friend trying to reel me back in. It looked for all the world like he’d just picked me up in a phishing drag net. I figured it was just a coincidence. His ‘Friend Request’ was probably sitting in thousands of other profiles right then too. Maybe even Lenny, Jenny and Alex had one.
The toned Mr Wildheart had been a diversion, but finding a bot can be an annoying reality check. The spell had been broken, and I was back out of my ‘old friends’ bubble. And that spam request reminded me that Hornworm was still out there, on my tail.
IT HAD BEEN two hours since he had sent his last communication, and still no reply. Ivan began to wonder if his target had just been fooling around with that last e-mail. This could have been his big break. His chance to earn promotion out of the Computer Room. It still could be. He resolved to wait another hour until his shift finished, before taking it upstairs.
There were several ‘Animals of Interest’ in Wild Wood that the Fox Special Force kept tabs on. Some were better hidden than others but all of them used the internet in one way or another, and, as Ivan the Whys put it, ‘The patient Fox will always eat, eventually.’
Ivan the Fairy had been assigned a folder with twelve Animals of Interest in it. Holly Berry had died within two weeks of Ivan starting work. Not, Ivan was fairly certain, his fault. Ash Key and Beech Nut appeared to be genuine Wild Wood Service agents and had always been quite chatty, but careless in the way they encrypted their messages, so Ivan had been able to proudly send some ‘intel’ ‘upstairs’ on a fairly regular basis. But that was it. His other AoI’s were silent. Not as silent as Holly Berry, but only just.
There were several ways to get yourself onto one of the Fox Special Force ‘watch lists’. Right near the top of the pile was ‘searching-for-a-top-secret-codeword’. The Mole, known as Oak Leaf, had made that transgression. He hadn’t made any more waves for at least eight months, but then four weeks ago he had surfaced again, sniffing around codeword ‘HORNWORM’. Ivan was sure that amounted to ‘intel’, so he had taken it straight ‘upstairs’ and some of the most important alarms had started ringing. The order came back downstairs that he was to keep a permanent eye on Oak Leaf and note everything he sent, if he ever surfaced again.
Ivan had stuck to his task and waited. He read and re-read ‘Play to Win’. He played chess against the computer. He rearranged the icons on his desktop.
Wait. Wait. Wait.
A patient Fox.
That morning, when the next contact finally came through, it had given him more questions than answers. He now had an extra name on his list. Nevertheless, the logic of the Computer Room was fairly easy to figure out, even for Ivan the Fairy. If you got ‘intel’ and sent it straight ‘upstairs’ you got a pat on the head and a long wait on a cold chair. If, on the other hand, you held on to your ‘intel’ and tried to use some initiative… Well, you stood the chance of getting out of the Computer Room and into a Task Force. There, the work was not too dissimilar to the Computer Room work, but the seats were more comfortable and it definitely meant that you were ‘working your way through the ranks’. That was what his uncle
had done, and now look at him: top of the tree!
So Ivan had held on to his ‘intel’, used his initiative, and gone searching for the new name: ‘Jay J Cottontail’. The Friend Request had been sent. Now all he needed was the reply and he could take that ‘upstairs’ and kiss goodbye to Computer Room duty.
Chapter Three
THE AIR IN The Stump sat, fat and stale, over the assembled evening clientele, as if reluctant to go outside. A jumble of animals sat or stood in twos and threes, their conversation mostly calm and indistinct, but punctuated by the occasional outburst of laughter from the group of city traders crammed around two tables in the centre of the room, who seemed intent on making sure everyone else was aware that their bonuses were flowing again.
Behind the bar a white Horse was patiently drying a pair of pint glasses. He placed them delicately on a shelf, then he turned around to the Stoat at the bar who had just downed his whiskey.
‘Refill?’ he asked. The Stoat nodded. Next to him a breathless Weasel arrived and slipped his hand inside a jacket pocket.
‘I'll get these, princess. You need to look after the pennies.’ Then to the landlord he said, ‘Do me a pint first though, Jeff, eh? My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.’
Oliver Weasel watched thirstily as the white Horse pulled a pint of real ale.
‘That’ll be twelve seventy,’ the Horse said. Weasel took a twenty out of the wallet and handed it over.
‘Cheers, Jeff. Keep the change.’
‘Thanks very much sir. Don’t mind if I do,’ said the landlord, and tinkled the change into the tips glass.
‘Hey, wait a minute!’ said the Stoat, suddenly aware something wasn’t quite right if Weasel was tipping the landlord. He patted his jacket pockets. ‘That’s my wallet!’