Specialized Education Dormitory 21.522-46518, Campus #21, Minepaulson. September 3. 12:48 PM New Midwest Standard Time.
Layme lay on her bed, idly clicking through different overlays on her wall's vis feed and wondering what she was supposed to be doing with her time. Having this much free time was disconcerting—in the past months she had become accustomed to spending every spare moment with Milo. She had been to so many parties that they all seemed to bleed together into one big flashing, drunken blur. She kept expecting to get tired of the way the alcohol made her feel, but the chem specs kept coming up with new things to keep her attention—Hypes, like the ones she had had on her first night, made to pump you full of energy; Smooths, made to keep you calm and relaxed; Mellows, weak drinks that existed simply to have something to drink; White Rabbits, a variety she had only tried once, which made you see everything in vivid colors and which, sometimes, made the drinker hallucinate quite realistically. Of all the varieties, she probably liked Reds best, intense concoctions specifically tailored to rev up your sex drive.
“Jesus, Lay!” Tessa had exclaimed, not altogether jokingly, when her cousin had explained the drink, and some of her resultant experiences. “I knew you had potential back when you were a choke, but I never thought you'd turn into a nympho!”
“Shut up,” Layme had laughed, rolling her eyes, as if she hadn't used the term to describe herself to her friend Rye not long before that. Still, what did terminology matter? Sure, she was having sex with Milo, and sure, that sex happened quite a lot. Did that make her a nympho? Maybe. But did it make her a slut? No, definitely not. She had only ever been with him, regardless of how many times that only encompassed.
It was Milo's fault she was sitting around now, bored beyond belief—he had opted for a White Rabbit from a stronger batch at a particularly psyched pulse a few nights ago, and had become convinced he had grown wings. Perhaps because of some sort of intuition, Layme chose to stick to strong Hypes instead. It was comical for a while, watching him flap around, until he had scaled a flight's worth of the spiral staircase and tried to jump down from it. He was lucky that he had walked away from it so easily—the only result, other than having to swallow a handful of charcoal pills to absorb the alcohol before he got to the medical wing, was a broken arm. It was being healed now. There were perks, he said, to being a bio-medical spec, including being able to opt for experimental methods like the micro-bacteria-sized robots that were busy knitting the bones in his arms back together.
The process was faster than the conventional cast, but it had still confined him to the med wing for a few days, stranding Layme in a sea of time in which she had nothing to do. Classes didn't start for another week, though they had all taken their pre-year exams at the end of August, and the med wing didn't allow visitors, so she had taken up messing around aimlessly on her drive. The boredom seemed worse today, and she considered calling Tessa just to pass some time before she remembered that Tessa was at a pulse with some guy. Layme couldn't remember exactly where Tessa and her family were this time—she had noticed she didn't always remember things that she used to remember, but that didn't really bother her; mostly because she forgot about it soon after thinking it—but the timezone was enough ahead that it was late night there. Tess had left an excited blip on Layme's drive, something about a boy and his brother and some sort of party. It didn't matter, really. The point was that Tess wasn't around to take Layme's mind off the blank space of time that lay before her.
Her fingers typed aimlessly along with her thoughts. Clearing the windows on her screen, she typed Tessa into a comprehensive search of her drive, just to see what would come up. Layers upon layers of video and audio calls, multi-media blips, and shared files, all joint-sorted under Tessa's call number, scrolled across the wall, overwhelming in the sheer size of their icons on the large screen. Layme was about to close the search when something came up sorted only in her own drive. It was a generic file named tessa-drivehack-1.1. Curious, Layme opened it—and after it had led her through about a dozen electronic hoops and loopholes, she realized what it was. It was a program code, wrapped under layers of random junk in order to keep it hidden. She entered a line of direction code that bypassed the infinite layers of junk encryption, and a familiar shape came up at the bottom corner of her wall—the blue-green cat that she had been working on for her cousin at the beginning of the summer. It paced back and forth, its virtual tail waving lazily. She tried clicking on it, but it didn't react. She hadn't gotten far enough into the project for that yet, she recalled. How long had it been since she had touched it? Had it really been before she became a Dragon? She thought back through the intervening months and found she could not remember working on not only Tessa's cat, but any programming project since she had moved into the Dorm in July. The revelation felt almost similar punch to the gut, and she felt for a moment as if her eyes had been uncovered of some sort of blindfold. She sat on her bed, flabbergasted, wondering how she had managed to go two months without doing the one thing she had always loved.
It's the alc, part of her mind spoke up, and she felt like perhaps she had had that same thought once before. Her first reaction was to dismiss it as fallacy... but something in her thought better of it, and so she thought a little about it. It was true that she had been drinking a lot since she had moved in. It wasn't as much as some of the Dragons, but it was a lot, especially considering that she had never had a drink in her life before moving to Spec-Ed. That had to have an effect on her desire to sit around and mess with programs. Of course, it couldn't be the only thing that effected it. The abnormal amounts of sex you seem to have with your boyfriend could be part of it, that voice in her head said, and she was shocked to hear herself sounding so bitter. It was as if a part of her had been thinking this the entire time, and she hadn't been able to hear it.
Carefully, as if she was afraid of breaking it, Layme opened up the base overlay for the aquamarine cat now pacing back and forth across her wall. She typed in a few lines of code that were meant to make the feline movable, and when she tried clicking it this time, it moved with her cursor. She felt the familiar pleasure that came with getting something like that to do what she wanted, and decided that she would finish the cat and send it to Tessa today. It was as good a way to chase of boredom as any, and she missed the feeling of getting a program finished. She set to work on getting the cat to interact with the other objects on the screen, and she was shorty so engrossed in the codes and functions and parameters that she forgot that she was a Dragon, forgot she was sitting in the middle of a dorm, forgot she
was waiting for her boyfriend to get out of the med wing. There was only the cat and the power of the code that made it exist.
It was a knock on her door that brought her back to herself—she jumped, having forgotten the world apart from that of the code on the screen. It was probably Ell or Rye, come by just to have someone to hang out with. She had left them both blips earlier in the day, pleading for them to rescue her from the suffocating depths of boredom. She activated the door release remotely; she was in the middle of a section that was going to hopefully connect the cat to the soft drive's isolated system. If she did it right, blips would come in by having the cat lope off screen and grab a small white mouse by the tail.
“Thanks for finally coming to my rescue,” she said to her visitor without looking up. She added a few more lines to the program as she spoke. “Let me just finish this really quick. Without Milo here, this is what I end up doing.”
“Well then, consider yourself saved,” said an unexpected voice. It was the only one that could have pulled her out of the numbers and symbols she was figuring in her head.
“Milo!” she exclaimed, turning around. She felt her face light up into a smile without any sort of conscious thought. It was just a side-effect of his presence.
“Hey there, babe,” he said, laughing as she sprung forward to tackle him in a hug. He hugged her back and lifted her onto her tiptoes so that he could kiss her. “What did I miss?”
“Not a lot!” Layme said, returning to her spot on the bed. Milo joined her, and she saw that there was a thin scar on his forearm. “How's your arm?” she asked anxiously.
“Perfectly fine,” he assured her, flexing it. She giggled. “All that bothers me about it is this stupid scar. You'd think they'd be able to get rid of it, but no, apparently I'm stuck with it.”
“I think it's sexy,” Layme countered, tracing its path from his wrist to halfway to his elbow.
“Do you?” he asked, and there was that glint in his eye that she could never quite bring herself to resist.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” she agreed in a whisper. They met in a kiss, and, just because she knew it would drive him nuts, she broke it off and slid backwards across the bed, laughing. She was back to her program before Milo had recollected his wits.
“Hey!” he protested, also laughing. He grabbed her from behind, catching her hands in his and effectively rendering her helpless. “That's not fair!”
“Who says?” she demanded, struggling jokingly in his grip. “Let me go, I was working on this!”
Milo looked up at her screen curiously, his hands still wrapped around hers. “What is it?” he asked. “Something for the masque?” Ever since Layme's idea at the beginning of July, they had been working with Zink, Shylo, Edda, and the rest of Zink's little group to bring everything to life. With the party only two weeks away, everyone was a little bit frantic, scrambling to put the finishing touches on whatever they had taken charge of. Layme, who had taken the job of designing the mask creator interface for the requisition system, had finished the program a couple of weeks ago. It had been effortless compared to the things she used to do—things like Tessa's cat, for instance—and it had taken a pitifully little amount of focus and work.
Layme loosed herself playfully from his grip and shook her head. “Nah, I finished the mask program ages ago. I gave it to Zink, and I'm just waiting for him to put it online. He said he would by Friday, so people have time to mess around with it.”
“Ice. You work fast!”
“Didn't I ever tell you I was a programmer in a past life?” Layme joked, poking him in the chest. “This is a find from my reg days. Something for Tessa.”
“Your cousin in San Angeles?”
Layme nodded. “I don't remember where she's at now though, her family's Government. They travel a lot. Anyway, I never finished it, and I found it when I was looking for something to do earlier.”
“What's it for? I mean, what does it do?” Milo asked, sounding genuinely curious.
“It's supposed to be a drive crawler,” she said, and seeing that he was confused, “Here, let me show you.” She closed the program's writing window and opened it normally, as if she was Tessa and wanted to use it instead of edit it. The feline, shimmering blue and green, its blinking eyes shining purple, prowled up and down the length of Layme's wall, leaping over the files she had dragged into its way, and occasionally batting at the cursor when Layme brought it near its face. She picked it up and dragged it to the middle of the screen, where it leaped up a series of drop-down lists as if scaling the side of a hill or climbing a tree.
“Pretty sweet,” Milo approved.
“You haven't even seen it in action yet,” Layme said, swelling a bit with pride at his praise. “Send me a blip.”
Milo obliged, and there was a quiet purring sound instead of the normal electronic beep. The cat ran off-screen for a moment, and when it returned, it had a white mouse in its mouth in addition to the regular little red bubble at the top of the screen.
“I haven't quite gotten the mouse to be able to open the blip yet. That's what I was trying to do when you came in.” She glanced up at him and was confused to see his brow knit in thought. “What's up?” she asked.
“Have you shown this to anyone else?” he asked.
“No, I just found it today, and since Ell and Rye never showed, you're the lucky one. I thought I might kind of open myself up for requests if this one works out, though. After the masque, of course. Why?”
“Hmm...” was all Milo said for a moment, seemingly thinking hard. “I don't think you should do stuff like this very often, Lay. It's not a good idea.”
She gaped at him, hurt. It was the last reaction she had expected from him. She thought he would have told her to go for it, maybe even asked for a crawler himself. It was the kind of eccentric thing he loved. “Why not?” she asked, her voice small.
“It's just...” He seemed to be thinking hard to find the right words. “It just isn't a good idea,” he repeated. “It's... it's just not done. You're not a Tech spec. You told me you'd decided to just stay general, right?”
“Well, yeah,” she agreed, feeling defensive and a little angry now. “But you're not a Chem spec and you work on alcs sometimes. Drinks are even your job for the masque!”
“That's different,” Milo argued, still seemingly trying to find the right way to say what was on his mind. “Alcs are side projects for the Chem specs. Stuff like this is what Tech specs do.”
“So what?” Layme demanded.
“So I thought you wanted to stay general!” Milo said, his voice heated now.
“Maybe I changed my mind!” Layme countered. “I'm allowed to do that if I want to!”
“But not for this!”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because—because—“ Milo was pressing on the bridge of his nose, as if the task of expressing his thoughts was giving him a headache. “Because I just don't want you to, Layme.”
“And that means I have to stop?” She was shocked to hear her voice tremble, and she bit down on her lip, hoping that she would be able to keep from crying.
“No—yes—I mean, trag, Layme.” Milo's voice was quieter, having heard the shake in her words. He took a deep breath and looked back up at her. “Forget it,” he pleaded. “I'm sorry, okay?” She dropped her eyes to her lap and he reached out to take a hand in each of his. “I'm sorry,” he repeated. “My arm still hurts, I've been cooped up in the med wing for almost a week, I'm all jagged up and frizzed out. I just want to go grab some Hype or some Smooth and dance with you.” He paused, measuring her reaction. He apparently determined that she wasn't getting angrier, because he suggested, only half jokingly, “Or maybe we could skip the dancing and just come back up here?”
She laughed shakily, and she heard him sigh in relief. The danger had passed, so to speak.
“Sure,” she agreed, moving so that she could rest her head on his shoulder. “I'm sorry I got upset. I guess having you gone frizzed me out.”
He put an arm around her and gave her a half-hug. “Let's forget it happened and go find Rye and Ell,” he suggested, smiling.
“If they're not up in Ell's room, jagging each other's brains out,” Layme replied, and that sent them both into peals of laughter. When they had recovered, Milo left to change clothes and Layme called Rye. Layme agreed to grab Milo meet Rye in Ell's room.
“He says he's got an idea to go with Milo's drinks for the party,” Rye said. “He wants you guys to be the first to test it out.”
“Sweet, Milo will like that,” Layme agreed. “I'll see you in a few.” She hung up with Rye and changed from her pajama shirt—an old green one of Milo's that she had stolen forever ago—into something more presentable, but as she did, her thoughts weren't on drinks or the masquerade or even Milo and their tiff. No, Layme's mind was on the blue-green cat that prowled her drive. She turned off the wall screen before she left her room, but it felt wrong, like something was missing, and so she called up the visual feed on her conscreens and set it to ninety percent transparency. The cat prowled like a ghost in her vision, and she left her room feeling much better.
As she sat in Ell's room later, a drink in her hand and the laughter of the others around her—the crowd had grown as the afternoon progressed—she felt strange, like something had changed since the last time she had spent a night with her friends.
You're being silly, she told herself. It's only been a week, and it's not like you've been doing anything. Nothing has changed. You just need to chill. But this time, talking to herself didn't change her point of view. She felt like she stood just outside the bubble of their party mood, and she was only on her second drink. It was a new creation of Ell's, just like Rye had said, and he had christened it Deception. It was definitely interesting, jet black and fiery, some strange mix of Hype and Smooth. It cast a dark shadow over her vision, making everything darker and more mysterious. She liked it, and she thought it would go well with Milo's prospective drink, Red Death, a mix which was a variation on the sex-drive-amping Reds. She couldn't bring herself to drink very much of the Deception, however. She was only halfway through a second glass in order not to insult Ell. If she had only herself to think of, she probably wouldn't have even finished one. She hadn't had anything to drink since Milo's broken arm, the act of solitary drinking seeming perverse somehow, and the buzz of alcohol, a feeling which she had become so accustomed to before, seemed weirdly out of place. She kept finding her mind straying towards the unfinished cat which prowled her drive, unseen. She had turned her vis feed off when she realized she was looking at it instead of the people she was talking to. The sensation of wanting to finish was like an itching in her fingers. She caught herself tapping her fingers on her knees, wishing she could just pull up her keyboard params and keep working.
Rye wandered over from where Milo and Ell were standing, deep in conversation about the Deception and the Red Death, no doubt. She must have noticed Layme's distracted demeanor, because the first thing she said when she saw down was, “What's on your mind?”
Layme started, having been unaware that Rye had come over. She opened her mouth to share the ideas she had been turning over in her head when Milo's words from before came back to her. Have you shown this to anyone else?... It's not a good idea. She changed what she was going to say the second before she said it.
“Milo and I argued earlier,” she said. “I guess it's just frizzing me out a little.” It wasn't exactly a lie. When she wasn't thinking of the programmed cat, it was the fight with Milo that filled her mind. Rye made a sympathetic sound.
“You guys don't usually fight, do you?”
Layme shook her head, and she took a sip of her drink almost without realizing she was doing it. “I don't think we've ever even argued about anything, not really.”
Rye squeezed Layme's shoulder. “Trust me, it happens eventually. Ell and I fight all the time.”
Layme looked over to the older girl, surprised. “Really? But you guys seem so great together!”
“We are great together,” Rye said, looking over towards where Ell and Milo were standing. “That doesn't mean we don't argue about trag. A relationship can't survive if you both agree with each other all the time. No two people are that similar. If you guys never fought, I'd be worried.”
“And why is that?”
“Because,” Rye said. “If two people always agree on everything, at least one of them is lying.”
Even though the entire conversation had started because of her fight with Milo, the words made Layme's stomach clench. It had honestly never occurred to her to be dishonest with Milo, or that he could possibly be less than upfront with her. Maybe Rye saw something in her face, because she assured Layme hastily, “I'm not saying that either of you are lying. You haven't been together that long, only—what, a couple months? It's totally normal for you guys to be just getting around to your first fight. You were bound to come out of the honeymoon stage eventually. It's fine, I promise,” Rye said, eager to see a sign of agreement from Layme, and perhaps worried that she had given the younger girl the wrong impression.
Layme thought about it for a moment. “Yeah, you're probably right,” she agreed, returning the smile that Rye was giving her.
“I know I'm right,” Rye asserted, laughing. The black beads in her dark green braided hair clicked together as tossed her head in mock authority. She looked over at Layme again. “Don't worry. You're not worrying, are you?” she asked with dramatic seriousness that made Layme laugh.
“I'm not worrying,” she promised.
“Good,” Rye said with a note of finality. “Now are you going to go over there and get him away from Ell, or are we both going to be sitting her, sexually frustrated, for the rest of the night?”
“Alright, alright!” Layme said, laughing. “I'll go detach him from your boyfriend.”
“You better,” Rye warned jokingly. “If you can't, don't expect to have them both to yourself. I'd be joining you.”
“I'd count on it,” Layme replied, rolling her eyes and smiling. “They'd probably enjoy that.” Still laughing, she got up from her place on the floor and made her way through the small crowd to tap on Milo's shoulder.
“Hey, Lay!” he said, and she was glad to see his face light up into a smile. Apparently the tension from before had been forgotten.
“Enjoying the drink?” Ell asked her. She turned to him, raised her glass, and knocked back the rest of it by way of an answer. “Right on,” Ell approved, nodding. Layme turned back to Milo and stretched up to press her lips to his ear.
“What do you say to going up and testing out what your Red Death does with the Deception?” she asked.
“Hmm...” Milo said, pretending to think about it. “I say that's the best jagging idea I've heard all night.” He smirked. “No pun intended.” Layme giggled and poked him in the ribs.
“Tragger,” she said, grinning.
“Always have been. Didn't you know what you were getting into?”
“Of course not,” she said. “I never thought it would be this amazing when it all started.”
Milo, grinning, turned to say goodbye to Ell, and Layme winked at Rye over her shoulder. She took a second to hack her friend's sound feed, and said, “He's all yours, Rye. Enjoy.”
Rye's laughter was still coming in over Layme's traguses as she and Milo left range, but all that Layme heard were the things Milo was whispering in her ear. They were already kissing as they walked through his door.
“Are you ready for this?” Milo asked when they had paused for a moment, holding up two glasses of blood-red liquid. “You know no one has tried it yet.”
“I don't think we need it,” Layme joked, “but we should probably test it while the Deception is still in our systems, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Milo agreed almost reluctantly. He gave her a once-over, almost without being aware of it. “But it seems like a waste of time at the moment...”
“Trag,” Layme laughed. “Down, boy. It's not like I'm going to tell you no!”
“Touche,” Milo said, handing her a glass and raising his own. “To hoping this works as well as it should.”
“And to taking full advantage of it,” Layme added. They both drained the glasses, and they resumed their kissing where they had left off. Within minutes, Layme could feel the effect of the drink—her heartbeat was outrageously fast, and she felt as if the temperature in the room had risen ten degrees. She felt every touch ten times as minutely as usual, and, added to the dark shadows which were the effect of the Deception, everything existed in an irresistible tone of sensuality.
“Well,” she gasped at one point, while both his hands and hers were busy with an article of each other's clothing. “You're a jaggin' genius, Milo.”
“You better fucking know it,” he replied, and his voice was a rough and attractive growl.
After that, words became useless again. They had a habit of doing that when the two of them were together, Layme reflected briefly, and she decided she didn't mind at all.
An hour or so later, Layme lay awake beside Milo, staring at the blank darkness of the ceiling. He had fallen asleep quickly, dragged down by too much alcohol and the residual effects of his stay in the medical wing. She, on the other hand, hadn't felt more awake in a long time. She had just resigned herself to a long, empty, insomniac night when she remembered she was wearing her conscreens, and she had an unfinished program waiting for her. With a silent gesture of triumph, she opened her vis feed and pulled up the cat program's writing window. Her fingers flew through the air with decisive speed as soon as the window was open, typing in the lines and words that she had been thinking of most of the night. Before another hour was up, when it was around eleven, Layme had put the finishing touches on the programming and had layered it with another set of random, generic loopholes, so she could drop it into Tessa's shared file box without anyone else knowing what it was. She had sent Tess programs before, so her cousin knew how to bypass the electronic padding and run the program. She saved the final draft, renamed it bio notes so it was doubly inconspicuous, and attached a note to it before giving it to Tessa.
Hey lady. I bet you have no idea what this is. Well, open it up & take a look =) I found it in a fit of boredom today & figured I should finish it (finally!). I'm sorry it took so long. Tell me what you think, & as always, any bugs in it can be fixed if you let me know. I hope it's what you wanted! ://Layme. PS::How were your boys tonight?
Finishing her message, she called up Tessa's public drive and dropped the crawler program into her cousin's drop-box. While she was watching the transfer, she was already erasing the program and all of its temporary files off of her own drive. It was something that was probably unnecessary, but it was a habit—wiping the temps meant she had done everything in her power to keep the program from being traced to her. It was silly, taking such careful steps for something as insignificant and simple as a drive crawler program, but wiping the traces had become so habitual to Layme that it almost took on the tones of ritual. A few moments after she had dropped the file, jut as she finished the wipe, her drive confirmed the copy—and there was a glitch in her visual. She froze, hands in mid-air, her heart suddenly pounding in her throat. Most people wouldn't have noticed the glitch at all, but Layme had been half-looking for it as the file transferred. It was why she had been deleting the crawler's files from her drive. No, most people wouldn't have thought twice about it, but as a programmer, she had made other people's drives glitch the same way.
It had been the sign of a direct-hit program interacting with her soft drive.
As soon as she had recovered her basic power of movement, she opened up her drive's processes window—a program that told her everything going on in her little part of the system: what it was sending out, what it was receiving, what it was running, and what was interacting with it. It was that last part that she was concerned with. She selected the filter and began combing through the gargantuan list of interactions occurring on her drive. There was everything from its connection to the Dorm building to the supporting connections of the Federal system, as well as connections to everyone who tracked her public content—well over a hundred family members, friends, and acquaintances. She went through the interactions list one by one until she found what she was looking for—an interaction from the past five minutes, one oddly titled lightning-storm. She had never seen anything called lightning storm before, and she had no idea what it might be. Certainly, this had to be the program that had initiated the hack. Why it had done so, and who had set it up, she didn't know, but she intended to find out.
Layme entered the raw code that brought a write-window up in her vision again and started typing. The way she did it was awkward, and she was sure there was a faster, cleaner way to get what she wanted, but how she did it was serviceable enough. She now had a direct-hit on the program that had direct-hit her. This was something she had heard about but never tried: a mirror-hack. She was determined not to think about it too hard—if she did, she was bound to confuse herself. A mirror-hack was like taking three mirrors, setting them in a triangle with the reflective sides inward, and standing at their center. The reflections they cast were endless. The hack was meant to confuse the lightning-storm program so that it created a hole for her program to go through. If she got inside the intruding program, she thought she might be able to trace its source or shut it down. One of the two outcomes was acceptable, but she was shooting for both. Layme thought of her programs as her territory. They had been that way in her mind ever since she had discovered that she could write them at the age of twelve, and they were one of the only things she held at high value, one of the only things she would not compromise. Now there was an unofficial program coming from an unnamed proggie that was trying to track her System activity, or at least do something similar. It was an action that could stop her from programming for good if it was being run by the right—or wrong, depending on how you looked at it—people if she did not stop it first. She felt almost betrayed, as if someone she had trusted had stabbed her in the back, and a fierce and primitive need to vanquish the unexpected threat burned in her head.
She added and changed lines upon lines of code for almost ten minutes, watching the raw data that was bouncing back to her from the mirror in a second window, before she finally found what she was looking for—a place where the double hit had confused the intruding program's illusory system. Her breath hissed triumphantly between her teeth, which were clenched in concentration. “Gotcha, you father-traggin' bastard,” she whispered viciously, entering directions that would enable her to bypass the same kind of electronic loopholes that had allowed her to send the cat program to Tessa without being detected by the regular System security. She ran the code she had entered and watched the other half of her display in anticipation, waiting for the outer junk layers to leave from lightning-storm's read-out and the actual functioning information to take their place.
The steady scroll of hollow code coming in from lighting-storm stopped abruptly, and Layme made another unconscious gesture of triumph before the halted screen moved again. She sat motionlessly as line after line of X's paraded across both the lightning-storm read-out and the one she had been working in. She had shaken off her shock and was about to force-quit her drive, fearing a termite program—something that would plant itself in the basic workings of her drive and systematically trash everything on it—when the X's stopped too, and another, slower-moving string of letters appeared amidst the X's in both programs' windows.
XXXXXXXX YOU THINK YOU'RE SMART DON'T YOU? XXXXXXXXX, it read. Layme stared at it, halfway between enthralled and panicked. Not knowing what else to do, she entered into her own program window, Who the trag are you? and hit the input button. Her message, like the one from lightning-storm, appeared in both windows, just below the line before it. At least she knew her mirror was still working.
WOULDN'T YOU LIKE TO KNOW? the owner of lighting-storm responded.
Think you're funny, asshole? she asked, anger resting like copper wire on her tongue.
DO YOU?
Layme stared at the visual in her conscreens, fists clenched, fingernails slowly carving mini crescent moons into the vulnerable flesh of her palms. Like hell I do, she answered. And, without giving the mystery programmer a chance to reply, she asked again, Who are you?
There was another unbroken line of X's in response.
Layme's anger shifted a little at this turn of events; the smallest bit of competitiveness bled into her fury, taking root in it and manipulating it. If Lightning Storm wanted to play, she could at least give them a run for their money. She wrote a few lines and submitted them to run, and she was pleased at their effect—the alphabet scrolled in a repeating loop across the other programmer's screen, blocking it from regular functions, but did nothing to her own. She was operating, so to speak, from behind a one-way mirror now. Lightning Storm could no longer see what she was doing. Just as Layme was preparing to initiate a sequence that would track the source of the other program, the option to submit new code to her program grayed out—she couldn't add anything to it. A new message displayed without her consent beneath her unentered lines.
NICE TRY, LAYME.
The window she had been using to track lightning-storm disappeared and the lines of code in her program scrolled backwards until the window was blank. The other proggie had erased all of it. A moment later her input option reverted to its normal state and she tried to restore her mirror-hack, but it was no use. The mystery person had erased all of it, including its temporary retrieval files. Whoever they were, they were good. Very, very good. Layme went back into her interactions screen to try and find lightning-storm, but it was no longer on the list. She didn't know if that meant the source had withdrawn it, or if they had simply made it invisible. She couldn't be sure, of course, but she thought it was the first option. Whoever had made and run lightning-storm had done so in order to track her somehow. Why else would they have been there to answer her when she tried to trace them? Tracer programs, like any program, would run on their own and do what they were made to do without any input from an outside source once they were activated. There was no reason for lightning-storm's programmer to be aware of how their program was functioning at all, unless it was a tracker program, and Tessa's cat had triggered an alert for the tracking system's parameters.
Layme racked her brains for another reason—any other reason—that someone would direct-hit her drive, but she came up empty. The only logical conclusion she could see was that someone wanted to catch her in the act of programming. And why, she asked herself desperately, would they want to do that? From what she could come up with, there were only two reasons someone would want proof that she was programming: to blackmail her with it, or to skip over the blackmail and turn her in. Neither option looked like one she wanted to experience—she didn't know who she would be turned in to or what lightning-storm's owner would blackmail her with, but she was sure neither one was something she wanted to deal with.
How are you supposed to stop them? she asked herself as she tried once more to restore her mirror-hack, with no results. You don't know who they are, or where they are, and you're at a disadvantage. They can trace you, but they brick-walled you. You can't do anything to them.
Frustrated and shaking slightly as an after-effect of her earlier protective fury, Layme logged out of her drive and slipped out of bed to the bathroom, where she took out her contacts. She was more than at a disadvantage—she was, for all intents and purposes, operating blind. The lightning-storm programmer had used her name, something which had just seemed annoying at the time but, in retrospect, meant they knew much
more about her than she knew about them. The prospect was enough to cause a feather of nervousness to take shape in her stomach, and as she ran some water to wash her face in the hopes that it would make her feel more normal, her mind returned to Lightning Storm's motives.
Programming was a gray area in pretty much any and every context she could think of. It wasn't expressly illegal, like uncensored publications or print media, but the collective view on it seemed to be that it was just not done—and hadn't Milo used those exact words in their argument earlier? There was a sense of near-criminal secrecy around the whole thing. Layme had learned about programming from Tessa, an unlikely source given the other girl's general disinterest in the inner workings of technology. Tessa, who traveled the world with her parents, had been in some city in Europe and had called Layme, excited by the things the European teenagers could do with a wall screen. Curious, Layme had played around with options on her drive until she found the window that would display its functions in raw code. A few days of studying it, and she found she was able to make small alterations to the code that did the same things she could do through the common drive options—change the color of her theme, rearrange buttons and files, and choose what part of her drive she was looking at. A few weeks later, and she was writing rudimentary code of her own—randomizing her display background, her theme color, and even her audio options.
She had done all this independently, with no input from teachers or classmates. She wouldn't have known why if she had been asked, but she carried the sense that perhaps what she was doing wasn't strictly in the realm of accepted hobbies. Sure enough, as the next few months had progressed, she began hearing whispers among the other members of her class.
Did you hear? So-and-so was suspended!
Suspended? What did he do?
Someone said he tried to hack the teacher's brightboard.
No way!
Did the Govlies nab him?
I don't know. My sister said no, but her boyfriend said he thought he saw them coming across campus to grab him...
There was an air of secrecy cast over the concept of anyone programming for any reason. Layme was sure there were others in her class who did it, but no one talked about it, ever. It was almost as if it was something perverse, something to be ashamed of, an addiction not to be talked about but to be ignored, lest it drag you in. And so Layme wrote her programs for fun, in secret, sharing them sometimes with Tessa or with other cousins in various parts of the country with the express instructions not to reveal who had made them. If the programs, harmless things like basic drive crawlers or word clouds that tracked your frequent System searches, were to be broken open, so to speak, the creator's name would display as Rayme, a combination of her first and last names that was also a less-common first name in itself. It was generic but also let her lay her claim to what she made, and it kept her safe. No one but another programmer would be able to trace the pseudonym, and she doubted Tessa and her other family members would be friends with programmers. They weren't the type.
For years now she had operated that way, and now she thought perhaps she had been too cocky, too sure of herself. She wondered again who she would be turned in to if Lightning Storm, whoever they were, had that motive in mind. The people who ran the Dorm? The Govlies who were in charge of campus security? Or maybe what she was doing fell under city jurisdiction somehow. She didn't know; she only knew that she wanted to avoid that outcome of at all possible. As she let her mind go off on its own, turning over possibilities and outcomes, she came upon an idea. It wouldn't do much if Lightning Storm was going to try and blackmail her, but it would work just fine if they were trying to turn her in. If the tracking program had caught the cat program and made a copy of it as proof of some sort, it was still layered in the illusory system she had given it—Lightning Storm wouldn't be able to use it as proof of anything without bypassing the system and proving that they were a proggie themselves. They would need other kinds of proof, and to do that, they would have to keep watch on her drive.
And I can keep you out, she thought, grinning in triumph again. She would build a firewall program, and, if possible, she would target lightning-storm specifically. She was pretty sure she knew enough so that she could block the intruding program and still let the rest of her drive function normally, and if not, she could always learn.
She turned off the light in the bathroom again and went back to bed, deciding that there wasn't anything else for Lightning Storm to see on her drive tonight, and she might as well get some sleep.
“What's up?” Milo muttered sleepily, squinting at her as she climbed into bed again.
“Nothing,” she assured him. “Go back to sleep.”
But the kiss she gave him was distracted—her mind was already filled with numbers and settings, and it remained that way long after Milo's breathing returned to the steady rhythm of sleep, stopping only when she fell asleep herself an hour later.
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