Chapter 12: Tommy Knocking at the Door (Part I)

Operating System Architecture and Design happened to be a lab today. Instead of going to their usual lecture hall, the class broke up into three sections of twenty people each, and crammed themselves into dark rooms filled with banks of computers. The colorful phosphors on the screen in front of Elaine made her miss her own lab—she tried not to think about the letter burning a hole in her backpack, but her thoughts settled on it anyway.

Instead of obeying, her fingers slid her mouse to open a Firefox window and then tapped out the asu.edu address that would give her the proper location for the Office of the Dean of Engineering. Sure, the letter spelled it out—in three places—but she couldn’t quite be sure of which building that was unless she saw it on the map.

It was a summons.

Almost an ultimatum.

The letter detailed that she had been suspended on suspicion of piracy, quoted various regulations on her with the § section symbol breaking between multiple parenthesis and brackets. She knew all of them, well, she knew what each of them said. A curse of having a photographic lexical memory—words stuck. This didn’t mean that she fully understood the legal ramifications involved, but that they were trying to make it look quite dire. And apparently it was the second notice.

The second notice? When was her first notice?

Right: when they raided her lab.

The class project today was to create a simple interface driver to talk to a clock. She’d finished the entire code in a matter of ten minutes. The TA hadn’t realized that the interface libraries also included incremental query code for the USB, allowing buffered I/O and a small series of structured queries. As her final flourish, the code could gracefully interrupt already running queries if a trap condition arose due to the device being unplugged (instead of a standard timeout.) Professor Abraham had warned her before about being flippant with her code, it would someday get her into trouble, but he said it with a twinkle in his eye and promptly gave her an A on the last quarter term assignment.

Laws and regulations were a type of code, she mused to herself. With enough study she should be able to use them to her own favor. She just needed the time to construct what she needed with the fragments of knowledge that she had, the book of regulations for ASU, and the College of Engineering, would have to suffice as her codebase. As long as everything was defined and interacted with itself in a sane manner it shouldn’t be too difficult for her to code herself out of this mess and get her lab back.

She stared at the map and her eyes slid over to the Law College.

Of course, Lindsay would know better than she the intricacies of the rules and regulations. If the protocol was really that simple then lawyers wouldn’t be needed—then again, if programming was so simple there neither would be programmers.

The letter from the Dean had been adamant that she appear today. Her absence from his audience apparently did not look good for her. She wondered why exactly that quip needed to be added—and added it was, in indelible black ink to the bottom of the letter. She chewed on her pen for a moment. She didn’t know the Dean. What if he knew her parents?

She narrowed her eyes.

She hadn’t considered a possible familial connection. Both her mother and father had graduated ASU with honors and although Zane hadn’t yet shown himself to be anything other than a slacker, she at least was walking in her mother’s footsteps. Her mother still worked on projects with the College of Engineering on occasion, linking the University with the Military Industrial Complex; and her father, the Art History major who went on to become a famous expert in forgeries and crimes of art and passion had a room named after him in one of the Liberal Arts buildings. She didn’t know which—they weren’t places that she visited often.

That was about when Josh Hillman came up on her. The TA. She heard him coming because his shoes squeaked against the floor like sneakers on a basketball court. Chairs rattled as people tried to slide out of his way, but he jostled into them anyway. She didn’t know what his problem was, but he had a special place in his heart for bothering her. She dialed her face to an expression she hoped looked slightly annoyed and indifferent at the same time. Rather a straight line for the mouth and relaxed eyes.

“Your last submission to the mudbug server was two bytes over mine,” he said.

“It also finishes two point two seconds faster,” she said. She could feel her eyes tightening, she wanted to arch her eyebrows inward like Spock, and imagined the emoticon for a slightly annoyed person.

“Ah, but the extra credit wasn’t on speed,” he said. “It was for code efficiency.”

“I like things to be faster. Space isn’t as premium as time on modern computer systems.”

“I hear on the grapevine that your lab got trashed,” he said.

What. Did the entire campus get a memo?

Not one for subtlety, Josh. It was difficult to tell if he was hitting on someone or just hitting them—at least the girls, Elaine had noticed. She did know one thing: even Frog didn’t like him. At least not in that way. They reacted to each other like oil and water, and that was all Elaine needed to know about his potential as someone she would want to deal with.

He moved in very close. Too close. The map giving directions to the Dean’s office loomed large on the screen. She saw his lips mouth the name and concepts connect in his head. In order to look at her screen, he literally had to put his head over her shoulder; she could have taken her fingers struck him in the eyes like the Three Stooges.

His breath smell reminded her of a rancid Cheeto she’d once found in one of Zane’s computers and his glasses were glazed over with a layer of dust and calico cat hairs.

Not willing to cringe, instead she followed the crawl of her skin and got out of her chair and drew away from him. Forget annoyed face, she switched directly to “I will tear your eyes out and use them as Tesla Orbs.” So quickly she moved that she accidentally knocked the mouse off the table. It clattered to the floor and for a moment she felt sympathetic for its plight.

“The Dean?” he said. “It’s must be true. You’re in some sort of trouble.”

“None of your business, Hillman.”

All around, people were packing up their backpacks, standing up, pushing in their chairs and heading to the door. Elaine did the same, except that Josh followed as she headed to the door.

Josh dogged her all the way there. “Come on. Did you get into some sort of trouble? Hacking maybe? I know you do it.”

The phone rang at her hip, but instead of dismissing Josh, she grabbed it, flipped it open, and walked away.

“This is Elaine,” she said, breathless.

“Yo ‘Lanie.” It was George, Zane’s roommate, and he had urgent news. “Said you wanted to talk to Tom Barrett? He’s got his office hours now, but you’ll want to hit him up tonight—before five. According to his updated schedule he’s going out of town until Tuesday. Vacation.”

Lindsay’s friend and the Dean were just going the have to wait.

The case was on.