Chapter 6: Haunted (Part I)

Elaine gently nudged Zane out of his seat—gentle being a relative term, as she set down her Coke, and attempted to put her torso into the same quantum-space as his torso. As if on cue, he slid out of the chair and stood; and in that same moment her Coke replaced the space vacated by his on the desk. The maneuver had been perfected over so many years that neither really needed to say anything. Perfectly interchangeable siblings.

“It’s got to be there, I saw it with my own eyes,” she said. “Nothing is as easy as it looks.”

“Do you think it had a self-destruct built in?”

She rolled through the picture files, slower this time, from the most recent to the oldest. Everything looked pretty similar to their first run through, and nothing with even a passing similarity to the tesseract-image she saw on Emily’s iPhone earlier that day. Aside from a strange number of exact duplicates, the pictures themselves didn’t raise any sort of suspicion.

“The radio was off the moment I took the phone,” she said. “So if a self-destruct had been set, it would have had to use the programming on the phone. And this image was an arcane effect, so it must have left a fingerprint.”

She unsnapped the cellphone from her hip and flipped it open. Zane smiled when he saw it in her hands. The phone, nicknamed the Enoch, once-a-Motorola, now had been kitbashed into something entirely transcendent of its ordinary technology. Elaine had come up with the idea after reading MAKE and employed Zane’s electronic know-how and artistic ability to design a new keypad and replace the processor. The shell of the phone still looked the same, but inside beat the heart of an arcane device.

“I see you upgraded it,” he said, gesturing towards the medallion on the bottom that would normally have displayed the Motorola “M” but now instead had an “E” in the same font.

“I couldn’t let that pass without modification,” she said.

The keypad had been replaced with one that displayed the Enochian alphabet instead of American, and Aleph-numbers instead of standard. The phone could connect by virtually any cable as long as it standardized to under half-an-inch by three inches. The port on the side used spring-loaded sliders, bearings, and multiple pins that attempted to match the factor of the plug offered—and on the other side a standard 2.5mm gold-plated audio jack just in case she wanted to plug a headset in.

The screen currently displayed the off-green connect signal. It had been replaced with a touch screen sandwiched between layers of micron-thin Cathedral glass that Elaine had suffered great expense to obtain and grind to fit. The Cathedral glass was sensitive to astral and umbral emanations, allowing the screen to also act as a conduit for magickal forces when she used spellcraft through the interface. Earlier versions required her to prick her finger with lancelets from a Diabetic testing kit in order to power certain effects.

From the arcane tech kit she grabbed an insulated USB cable—a whip thin cord made from high grade wire and wrapped in sigil etched electrical tape. The sigils had to be done up like a Rail Fence Cipher to neutralize the spell before preparing the wire, once wrapped around the cable, aligned to the micrometer, the sigils and geometry would line up and the wards would activate. Shielded cables came in very handy when something might get escape or outside leakage could scramble spellcode.

The connect-green tuned through shades of blue as she started pressing buttons. Menus and macros slid by as the phone probed and prodded at the connection it had to the iPhone. A series of red, glimmering characters appeared on the side of the screen and Elaine nodded.

“She’s definitely run into something arcane recently,” she said. “Do you have recovery software on this thing? I’m guessing that if it affected the internals, it means that we are looking at something possibly stored in the phone, even if we can’t see it now.”

Zane leaned forward and moused around the desktop for a moment, finally yanking out a program. “I have a couple file recovery scripts that’ll do the trick with your iPhone; but only if the destruction was done by conventional means. I can’t pull a rabbit out of my hat the way you can.”

She frowned at that. He had a point—if it did involve spellcode even the most l33t software wasn’t going to find a trace of it. Unless…

“What if I give you the rabbit and then you recover the hat and compare them?”

“Missing-bit comparative cryptography?” he asked.

With the Enoch cellphone she could pull the rabbit—the data—from the hat—the iPhone’s natural data—and the difference between the two might give her a silhouette of what she happened to be looking for. A lot like how dust settling in a room could be examined to determine the footprints and positions of missing objects in a room after they had been removed—and possibly how long it had been since they’d been gone.

A button press later and the Enoch  spun through the contents of the iPhone like a kernel hacker through Jolt Cola. Data representations run through a spectrum analyzer flittered crazy kaleidoscopic geometries across the surface of her phone as it pumped the data out and sang it into the air via Bluetooth to Zane’s computer which happily drank them down. The entire process took ten seconds.

“Next time,” Zane said. “We should use the Enoch to pull the data out instead of my computer. It took forever to download it last time.”

“What can I say.” Elaine patted the phone. “Superior technology from superior ingenuity.”

“Let’s look at what we’ve got,” he said.