Chapter 5: Two If By Phone (Part I)

“It’s not infected with anything,” Zane said. “If that’s what you were wondering. Conventional or otherwise.”

Elaine stood slightly behind her brother, arms crossed against the radiant cold in the air. The “Critical Isolation Room,” as he liked to call it, was generally kept around sixty degrees Fahrenheit, far more brisk than the desert-lizard in her would have liked. However, the low temperature was necessary to run the second most important piece of equipment in the room: the Faraday cage. Electrified metal bands about the width of her fingers surrounded them on all sides, penetrated the floor, and etched their way through the ceiling. Powered by an isolated generator with a small hydrogen fuel cell and a stack of car batteries, the cage prevented any stray electromagnetic waves from entering or exiting the isolation area.

The floor underneath the single desk, two chairs, computer (an old Dell with extra memory), and monitor had been meticulously etched like a strange alchemical painting. It took her two months of staring at technical drawings from the Arcana Obscura Technomircon; she had programmed a robot with a diamond-cutter waldo to reproduce the diagram to the specifications required. The entire job finished itself in under thirty minutes (twenty eight minutes, twelve seconds, to be exact.) The geometries of the diagram would catch and redirect fields of magickal energy much like the Faraday cage and bend them away, as those attempting to enter from outside, or drain them into the circle, as for those attempting to escape.

More careful coding, which Elaine had to draw by hand—certain types of magick simply did not work when digested through a machine—further enhanced the function of the circle. It took some trial and error to program it into the circle, but with Hadaly and Zane working together, they managed a sigil set that would—theoretically at least—contain harmful magickal radiations. This particular function had never been tested and Elaine hoped she wouldn’t have to.

Zane unplugged the iPhone from the computer, palmed it, and pushed the chair back. “Let’s get back upstairs. It’s freezing in here,” he said.

Shivering, Elaine followed him out wordlessly.

Zane’s house (he liked to call it a flat) stood two stories tall and the isolation room was in the basement. This saved him a lot of money on the cooling costs for the room itself, and it doubled as his server room. The first floor had all the requisite elements of a house: two bedrooms, a garage converted into a metal workshop, bathroom, living room, and computer gaming room.

The living room, as usual, was in a state of general disarray. Zane lived with two other people (flatmates) neither of whom thought much about their own hygiene or the hygiene of others, and had long ago forgotten that Elaine was a girl. Two years earlier they would actually make a pretence of cleaning the living room when they heard she was coming over. Now George and Ben literally sat on a bedding of discarded clothing on the couch. They waved as she passed—even in the dim light, flickering as it was from the PS3 game, she could tell George wasn’t wearing a shirt. His white underwear luminesced as if under a black light in a strip just below his anorexic stomach.

Zane would never do that, she reminded herself.

In back of the living room was a door. And that door led to the gaming room: a reasonably sized area with a recently installed drop ceiling, blacked out windows, and an entire wall dedicated to a single flat piece of white canvas for a projector. The projector’s current interest happened to be replaying the final rounds from some FPS video game that looked to Elaine like Halo. Alien bodies flew and explosions flashed as figures weaved between buildings of unlikely architecture.

Computer monitors hummed and glittered from every corner of the room, crammed as tightly as they could while permitting enough space for users to move their elbows as mice required. Screensavers mostly splashed spinning star fields, images of the S.S. Enterprise, and on one screen random pictures of animé pin-up girls. Zane’s workstation had a display of falling raindrops scattering ripples in an empty pond. He moved a figurine of Master Chief out of the way before wiggling his mouse to wake the computer up.

“I need you to get me everything you can,” Elaine said, “from diagnostic information to every e-mail this device has received. Most importantly, I’d like to see the last few e-mails that came in. The very last one that it downloaded from its service.”

“Everything?”

“Down to the bolts.”

Knowing that she was just as knowledgeable about these things as he was, Zane opted to plug the iPhone into his machine via a USB cable and skip his usual theatrics.

After connecting in the iPhone its screen suddenly brightened, a wait screen appeared, and then the backlight dimmed again. Zane’s computer responded by throwing up a spinner and a pie chart that slowly started to wax as data downloaded. Extremely slowly, to Elaine’s eye.

“I heard that you lost your lab today,” he said. “Real bummer.”

“Yeah, I was there.”

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

Did she? No. Not really. “Maybe later.”

Zane glanced at the spinning indicator as its pie slowly filled. Emily had managed to fill almost the entire memory of her iPhone and it apparently didn’t want to give it up at the highest bit rate it could.

The sound of the fridge opening caught her attention and she turned towards him.

“So… How’s the sexdoll project going?” he asked, eyebrows waggling.