Chapter 4: Life is a Bitter Daliance (Part I)

“What’s got me on this one,” Elaine said as she unlocked the door to her room and swung it open for Frog. “What exactly turns an otherwise well-adjusted socialite into a wreck?”

“Maybe she doesn’t want her parents to find out—or, she’s telling the truth, she can’t let it leak that she’s been winning the elections because someone else is cheating for her,” Frog said. She sighed. “Girl, you’re looking a gift horse in the mouth. You just got paid more money than I see in a single paycheck for less hours of work. Up front.”

“I know. I’m just still a little uneasy about this case.”

“If it gets out of hand we will call the police. Screw discretion. It’s not like you’re a real PI.”

Frog flung her backpack across the room onto the bed and followed by flopping down onto her stomach. Further into the lightless murk Hadaly turned a slightly luminous head in her direction—in the dark she looked like a poorly blue-screened Force ghost: a girl slightly taller than Elaine, blonde ponytail limned with an azure light. The glow that limned her silhouette formed from the agitation of nitrogen atoms fluorescing when she manifested her hologram-self.

Hadaly normally existed as self-aware computer code; the trick of manifesting herself had been one of her first attempts at socialization. Although Elaine wasn’t sure how healthy it was, she’d allowed Hadaly’s initial development—right out of the bottle, as it were—happen on Internet forums like SomethingAwful and 4chan. The latter she later wished never happened after the strange crush of memes and other indecipherable gibberish that Hadaly collected began to pile up like driftwood. Fortunately, Hadaly did have the capability of maintaining impeccable grammar however able she also was with keeping up with any addled /b/tard rant.

Presently, the AI stood at near attention waiting for Elaine to give her instructions. Although she appeared calm, she could have been doing any number of things behind the scenes: polling surveillance, listening to Internet chatter, or more likely teasing some hapless newbie on one of her favorite haunts into a nervous breakdown…

“Two things for you,” Elaine said.

The iPhone and the Mason jar containing the gremlin clinked down on the table nearby. Hadaly’s specter smiled as she strode across the room, her attention caught and held by the latter object. The tiny gremlin had quieted down somewhat, but it still fizzled and sparked along the underside of the lid, looking for an electrostatic weakness in the barrier. The seals on the jar had been carefully laid, Elaine knew, so the search went entirely in vain.

“You brought me a friend,” Hadaly said, her luminous fingers mimed tapping on the glass. “Cognomen gremlin domesticus.”

“Not to eat.”

Hadaly pouted.

“Lay off it already,” Elaine said. “Not in the mood. I had my lab taken away from me today.”

“They broke out the keys when they discovered the keypads weren’t going to give them the time of day. Or maybe it was when I started taunting them with the fact that they weren’t getting in.”

“You didn’t…”

“Have a sense of humor,” Hadaly said, crossing her arms under her breasts and lifting her chin. “If there’s any time that a display should flash ‘FUCKU’ on a fivepin alphanumeric display that was the moment.”

Elaine put her hand on her face. “Oh frell.”

Frog’s muffled voice countered the next thought. “She couldn’t have stopped them anyway.” She had grabbed one of Elaine’s Raiders of the Lost Arc pillows and grasshoppered her arms around it. Legs crooked up, face down, chest heaving. Elaine half-smiled at the thought that it looked a lot like Frog was trying to neck Harrison Ford. Yet another victim of her friend’s steady conquests.

“Good news is,” Hadaly said. “I cut all of the lines to Ritual and your other caches of server equipment. Even if someone had been watching at the time when they started shutting stuff down and carting it off, they’d have no clue where to look.”

With so many different IT Departments wandering around ASU campus proper, it was easy to hide things on the network. The various domains that they covered overlapped here and there but jurisdiction of particular parts of the entire expanse made for tricky and sometimes strange liaisons—in a lot of cases a machine sitting on a network belonging to the College of Education could broadcast an address or spoof a MAC suggesting it belonged instead to Engineering.

“Didn’t see it coming,” Elaine said.

“Neither did I.” The AI shrugged and narrowed her eyes. The faraway look that passed over her face usually meant she’d passed concentration somewhere else. Some of the algorithms that controlled her facial movements would relax the virtual muscles to mimic the lapse of attention. A moment later she shook her head. “Still nothing,” she said. “The entire operation to neutralize your lab happened in meatspace. Whoever put it in motion is probably a real luddite.”

“I suppose things could have been wor—”

Knock, knock. “Special delivery!” The door swung open and the lights came on.

Before the lights came fully on or the door had opened all the way, Hadaly vanished like a blown-out candle, and Elaine stabbed out with her foot to stop the door. It stopped half-way open and there was an oof as the intruder—Jacob Reed—and his pizza collided with the abruptly stalled door.

“I thought I locked that.”

“Girls!” he lamented. “Let me in, I brought pepperoni.”