Chapter 1: Chime! You Got Case (Part II)

It took a full minute before she heard the chink-chink sound of his office keys fade from earshot.

Once she was certain he had evacuated her personal space, which Elaine considered to include the entire region of her workspace and the immediate other side of the door, she prepared for work. Flinging her arms to her sides she worked her fingers in stretches like a maestro preparing to conduct an orchestra. She flipped open the tech kit and fished out a pair of heavy goggles and a microwire USB spool.

The goggles fit snugly onto her forehead and she flicked a switch recessed into the left lens. A soft beep emitted as they powered on, using a short series of watch batteries sewn into the band for startup power. The emitters inside couldn’t run on that power, but they did have to warm up before they could be used. She had designed them in “ENG495: Wearable Miniaturization and Design” and at full drive the emitters could transpose high resolution video onto her vision.

The USB cable spool whzzed as she pulled it out and plugged one end into her cell phone and attached the other to her goggles. Two bars. 15 Mbit/s wasn’t good but if it was the best that the wireless network could handle down here, she would make do. The cell’s display flipped an hourglass a few times as it got itself connected to the network and finally displayed a grainy image of the server rack. She flipped it closed and clipped it to her belt.

The room would have been generously measured at 6×8’ with only a few feet of walking room in the center not crowded by server racks and humming machines. Two vents on either side of the room stood high in the wall and breathed out extremely cold air. A workbench made of aluminum had been set up against the far wall with a short stool, where she had placed her tech kit. Keyboard. LCD monitor.

Elaine ignored them.

The goggles pulled down over her head, she hit the lights.

The HUD inside the goggles produced a totally different view of the room. The constellation of orange and green LEDs returned with a vengeance, glimmering in the dark like faraway boats. With the lights out Elaine also noticed something else: brief flickers of blue-white electrical arcs. Spidery fingers of discharge walked away from one of the servers—MSTATS C, she guessed—along an Ethernet cable, and slid across the ceiling overhead.

The discharges by themselves would have been curious and very bad for a computing environment, but with her goggles on she could see the telltale symptoms in their wake that suggested an altogether less mundane problem than simple static electricity.

Answer: Chews on wires; causes network disruptions; random static discharges; and sudden hardware failures.

Question: What is a gremlin?

Prepared for this eventuality, she kept several silver anti-static bags in her tech kit, along with etched Mason jars. While a static bag would certainly hold a gremlin nearly indefinitely, nothing escaped from a properly sealed Mason jar. Plus, fresh gremlins had value to other arcane practitioners—value that included a monetary payout if undamaged.

Next to them she had a small canister of canned air. She popped the tab.

Chime-chime! Alerted her cell phone. 3 missed messages.

“Not now,” Elaine muttered under her breath as she cancelled the alarm.

The gremlin seemed to be ignoring her, it was a tiny thing. Probably only a few centimeters across at equilibrium; Elaine had met one a year earlier that stretched almost a meter in length and packed one hell of a wallop. Not being her territory of expertise, she didn’t know very much about them, just that they seemed to be nascent intelligent electrons. Most gremlins just damaged electronics and hardware, random, aimless sabotage—like squirrels in the insulation of a house. However, as they grew, so also did their damage, and sometimes it could be far from simple sabotage.

Fraying through elevator cables, for example.

She slid one hand into the anti-static bag like a glove and wielded the canned air with the other. The telltales of the gremlin danced across the cables on the wall near MSTATS A and she knew that it would be far easier to catch out in the open so she aimed the canned air and let loose.

The rush of grey fog blew over the CAT5 in front of the advancing sparks and they suddenly froze in place, sensing the disturbance in the conductivity of the plastic and wire. She hit the cable again. The gremlin changed direction, making zt zt zt sounds as it went. She hit the cable on the other side of the discharges, swinging the fog so that it clipped the edge of the sparks. The two antennae-arcs at its forefront of electricity recoiled and it changed direction again, moving faster this time.

Like a little game of electrical tennis.

Foosh!

She clipped it again from the opposite side, this time putting the canned air dead-on into the gremlin and sweeping it up the wire.

All routes of escape blocked: the creature panicked. It jumped out of the wire and into the room.

Gremlins had numerous forms. Equilibrium often took the shape of a nebulous globe of St. Elmo’s Fire, like ball-lightning. Of course, this gremlin, panicking and on the run was far from equilibrium. Elaine had seen them range from domestic animals, large spiders, small children. They seemed to take shapes based on digitized images or the emotional expectations of workers in their presence. During WWII gremlins that regularly sabotaged planes appeared to manual laborers as dark, humanoid shapes wielding wrenches and hammers. This one looked like a red ball with cyclopean eyeball, numerous horns, and a gigantic mouth filled with serrated teeth. Someone had been playing DOOM on the network.

Of course, it was also only about as big as the last knuckle of her thumb.

She lunged forward with the anti-static bag and closed her grip on the thing before it could get its bearings and possibly jump into something she couldn’t easily exorcize it from—like her goggles or cell phone.

“Gotya!”

She sealed the static bag around the struggling creature and carefully deposited it into the Mason jar. The lid screwed tight, she deposited the jar and air canister back into the tech kit.

Pat on the back. Job well done.

Elaine flicked the light back on, scraped her stopwatch out of her pocket, and hit the button. Twenty-three minutes and fifty-six seconds. Hardly enough time to make good on the four hours she needed to get in. Well, those wires needed fixing. She had epoxy for that. Then she could do diagnostics on each of the servers for about an hour…but the remaining two-and-a-half hours that would leave she’d have to find something else—

The missed-call light blinked franticly from her hip and she frowned. Sliding the goggles up onto her forehead, she flipped the cell open. Six missed messages.

Each text more frantic than the last. She scrolled through them with increasing anxiety. It was the last one—sent five minutes earlier—that galvanized her into motion.

Campus security is raiding your lab. They just managed to override the electronic lock on the door. Get back here now!