Hello Protocol for Dead Girls Read online

  Hello Protocol for Dead Girls

  Zen DiPietro

  Contents

  Copyright

  1. I Don’t Remember How I Died

  2. The First Goal of the Dead Girls’ Club

  3. The Blue Room

  4. The Search for Socket

  5. But We’re Already Dead

  6. Boss of the Unknown

  7. E=mc2

  8. Brute Force Method Initiated

  9. Hello, Bitches

  10. Let’s Glow

  11. Not So Fast

  12. Regroup and Ungroup

  13. If Queries Were Horses

  14. Lights Out

  15. And To Think I Was Worried About You

  16. Trojan War

  17. Roll for Initiative

  18. A Girl’s Best Friend

  19. Corruption

  20. Infiltration

  21. As If It’s Your Last

  22. Status Check

  23. Watching

  Message from the author

  About the Author

  Other books

  Copyright

  COPYRIGHT © 2019 BY ZEN DIPIETRO

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, business establishments, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without express written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations for the purpose of review.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions. Distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law.

  ISBN: 978-1-943931-34-7 (ebook)

  Published in the United States of America by Parallel Worlds Press

  Cover art by Zen DiPietro

  1

  I Don’t Remember How I Died

  I don’t remember how I died. I only know that I did.

  At first, I thought I was having a dream so bizarre that I had become aware of the fact that I was dreaming. One of those completely nonsensical dreams, like you’re in second grade again, except your teacher is your next-door neighbor and for some reason you’re wearing an aardvark for a hat, and the darn thing keeps sticking its tongue out at the wombat sitting next to you, which is really making the wombat angry.

  I wish ending this could be as simple as having my alarm clock go off. But this isn’t a dream.

  It’s not the afterlife, either.

  It’s a nightmare.

  Last I knew, I was a college student majoring in programming. It’s not conceited of me to say that I was really good at it. I had a bright future ahead of me.

  There’s only an abyss ahead of me now. And behind me. And everywhere else.

  Since I’ve eliminated the possibility of this being a dream or an afterlife, that leaves only one explanation.

  A wretched one. A supposedly impossible one. It’s something that I was studying in school, so I can recognize the mechanics, but I never, ever expected to see it from this side. The irony of the situation hasn’t escaped me, but I think that my expertise in this area is exactly why I’m able to identify what’s happened.

  I’ve never known anyone who had their memory uploaded by law enforcement after their death. It’s a newer technology, which is rapidly improving, and has had a substantial effect on solving mysterious deaths and reducing the national murder rate.

  People are less likely to murder someone when they know their actions could be uploaded by the police after the fact. Improvements in the technology have allowed memory upload from bodies that have been dead for twelve hours with no life support, or even partial memory recovery from a damaged brain.

  The bad news for me is that memory upload only happens when a person dies under suspicious circumstances and investigators need to find out what happened.

  Since I’m now trapped inside a virtual environment, my death had to be a suspicious one.

  I’ve tried and tried to remember, but the last thing I can think of is studying for an exam in my dorm.

  The death event, as it’s called in the field of memory retrieval and analysis, must have been separated from everything else after the upload. Cut and pasted right out of my memory. But the rest of me is right here.

  That’s the big problem. I shouldn’t be aware of anything. Not my death, not being inside this digital behemoth, not anything. Dead is dead.

  But here I am. Formless and floating in this virtual environment. Somehow, along with my memories, they uploaded my consciousness. That isn’t supposed to be possible, but here I am. Trapped. Not alive, but still existing and unable to tell anyone what has happened to me.

  My name is Jennika Monroe. I’m dead, and I need to find a way out of here.

  When I first realized I wasn’t dreaming and that I couldn’t, in fact, wake up, I thought for a moment that maybe I’d reached a dark, very boring kind of heaven. Or a mild, very boring sort of hell.

  But I never really bought into all that afterlife stuff, and there are things about my current situation that lead to only one possible explanation.

  Data storage.

  I’m very familiar with the process. I’m a—I mean I was a junior in college. I lived to code. I started doing it sometime around first grade. Sometimes I even thought in code. I was already working on my senior thesis project—a way of streamlining the memory analysis process so that A.I. could search for potentially traumatic events rather than relying on human review. Of course, human review would still occur, but having A.I. do the work of surveying all the mundane stuff to uncover the critical stuff would speed up the process by days or even weeks. It could mean the difference between solving a murder and having the trail go cold. It could also mean apprehending the murderer before they had time to harm someone else.

  It’s something I’m deeply passionate about, to the point that I didn’t date or party in college. I had friends, of course, but outside my best friend Elly, they were all coders, too, and when we got together, we tended to talk about our studies.

  My knowledge of all this stuff is key, I think. I hope it will give me the skills I need to let the people on the outside know I’m in here. That my body might be gone, but my mind is very much alive in here.

  Entombed, in a way. This isn’t supposed to be possible.

  It’s not even exciting. Being in here is so boring. It’s like sitting inside a giant HVAC system. Even though I can’t see anything, I have a sense of being surrounded by a lot of empty space, which has a lot of connections coming and going from it. I can sense when one of the connections is active. It’s kind of like heat or vibration, but it’s neither of those. When it happens, I sort of hear something, though it’s not like anything I ever heard with my real, human ears. It’s more like a buzzing sensation. There’s nothing here that resembles humanity or life as I knew it. I’m certain it’s data transfer, though. It’s just something I feel.

  That feeling of data transfer is what clued me into my status as the recently deceased.

  But maybe I’m not that recently deceased. How would I know if years had passed? Or decades? It’s not like there’s a clock in here. Time is meaningless.

  What about my parents? Is the loss of their only child still fresh, or have they already died of old age? My death had to be devastating for them. We were always so close. They wanted lots of kids, but ended up with just me because life sucks like that sometimes. So instead of havin
g a house full of kids, they showered me with all the love and attention they would have given all those other kids. I can’t say I’m sorry, either. It was nice. I had the best parents.

  And what about Elly and Bryce? She’s been my best friend since we were in kindergarten and she transferred to my school in the middle of the year. She was so quiet and sad, I shared my lunch cookies with her. My mom’s chocolate chippers bought me a lifetime friendship. My cousin Bryce and I were always close, maybe because he didn’t have siblings either. I’m sure Bryce and Elly are both heartbroken about my death.

  It was a really nice life. Why does it have to be over? I had lots of stuff I wanted to do. Graduate. Get a job. Become a programming pioneer. Travel the world. Eat authentic food from every country in Europe and most of the ones in Asia. Fall in love and have a steamy affair. Maybe even get married.

  All of that’s gone and I don’t even know why. I want to be angry but I’m just so confused. My thoughts twist and get recursive, almost like my own code has been corrupted.

  Oh, shit. Has it? That’s the only way this could get worse. Maybe that’s why I can’t remember how I died.

  No, I can’t focus on that. If my data is scrambled, then all of this is pointless anyway. I can only focus on what I can do.

  Right.

  First goal: establish a hello protocol with the outside world. Make them aware that I’m here and proceed with two-way communication.

  I don’t yet know what comes after that, but I can’t just float around in here like some ghost. Hopefully the people out there can help me come up with the second goal.

  If I just had someone to talk to, someone to understand what has happened to me, it would be so much better.

  I’m so alone. I really need someone to talk to.

  2

  The First Goal of the Dead Girls’ Club

  I’ve learned how to go into sleep mode. At first, I did it on accident.

  I was entertaining myself by mentally coding a shoot-em-up style game, which is the kind of thing I do to keep myself from going crazy in here. Then I suddenly realized I’d stopped doing it, and started mentally categorizing all the places I wanted to go but never had the chance to see.

  I’d visited most of the big cities in the United States, but hadn’t seen much of other countries. I wanted to see Paris, Beijing, and Rome in particular. But I also wanted to see the simpler places where people live quieter, everyday sort of lives.

  The kind of life I’d planned to have.

  Anyway, I realized that I hadn’t intentionally shifted from programming the game to categorizing locations. I’d just spontaneously shifted. Some time later, that kind of shift happened again.

  It sure seemed like a sort of sleep mode, so I tried to find a way to do it on purpose. After a minute or two—or a decade or two, for all I know—of trying, I succeeded.

  I wish I had some concept of time. Anyway, I learned to toggle my presence on and off as desired, but it doesn’t really help me.

  The only other thing I can cling to in this barren existence is those data transfers I sense. It’s a power fluctuation, maybe, or use of bandwidth. Whatever it is, it’s like a police car, rushing along with lights and sirens blaring. It grabs my attention every time.

  I dedicate myself to those power fluctuations. I make them my entire existence.

  I begin to note their frequency and duration, and as I do, I learn to distinguish them. There’s the high-pitched one, like ringing glass, and there’s the low whirring one, like a washing machine. In between, I can discern at least a dozen other distinct types.

  What does it mean? Is this some sort of data nexus? Why would it be? I should be sectioned off into cold storage—a place where data is carefully kept separate to avoid corruption. Allowing access from other areas of the system would just be dumb.

  Of course, I’m not supposed to be conscious in here. So maybe that’s the difference. Certainly, no one ever considered even for a moment that uploaded memories could retain a consciousness of any kind. Those memory engrams are considered entirely electrical, though embedded into physical hardware.

  If anyone ever figured out how to replicate the brain in hardware form, people would be able to live forever. As it is, all we can do is upload the memories of the dead, which are like video or sound recordings.

  Wait. Hang on. Something about the thing I said. Not the memory engrams or recordings or living forever, but…yes, my location. Where am I? I should be in cold storage, but what if it’s some equivalent of a trash bin? What if the police, or whoever, have already gotten the data they need and I’m about to be purged?

  Fear surges through me. I’m afraid, and it’s not like how I experienced fear when I had a body. I don’t have a pounding heart or rapid breathing. I’m not sweating. I’m…I feel like I’m elongating or stretching somehow.

  What does it mean?

  When a data transfer that reminds me of the rushing of water through a pipe begins, I don’t even think about it. I latch onto it and use my new, stretchier sense of self to envelop it. Then I ball myself up and inject myself into it. Suddenly, I’m rushing along, like the time my parents took me sledding and we flew down hulking hills of white snow.

  I only have a moment to wonder if I’ve made a mistake and I’ve hurried my way toward deletion.

  “Who are you?” a young, feminine voice asks.

  Am I having a flashback or dream or something? I wish I could fling out my hands to grab onto something. I’m just so…formless. I’m like a camera view that does nothing but show a skewed perspective view with fuzzy edges.

  “Are you a friend of my mommy?”

  That doesn’t seem like something from a dream.

  I focus my attention on the question and where it came from, and am stunned to see a little girl, maybe six or seven years old, standing in the middle of a gray vignette. Her hair is in a neat brown braid down her back, and she’s wearing a pink dress with short, gathered sleeves.

  She seems so real.

  “Can’t you talk?” she asks, looking right in my direction.

  Of course not. I don’t have a mouth, much less a voice.

  “Are you real?” I’m shocked because this was my thought, but I can hear it like words. Just like I heard her.

  “No, I’m Ashta,” she says with the aplomb of a child. “Do you know where my mommy is?”

  “I don’t,” I tell her.

  I’m in a tricky position because I think she’s really here, just like I am. A child murder victim, maybe. It’s horrible, and sad, and I don’t know how to deal with that. But she somehow can speak to me, and somehow I can talk back to her, and I’m so damn glad for there to be anyone to talk to that I feel like sobbing.

  “How do you have a body?” I blurt before immediately regretting my words. She can’t possibly know where she is, and I don’t want to tell her she’s dead and never going to see her mommy.

  “What do you mean? Everyone has a body.” She squints at me, puzzled.

  “I don’t,” I say.

  She frowns. “If you’re going to play the ghost game, you have to hide. It’s the rules. It doesn’t work if I can see you.”

  “Wait. You can see me?”

  Now she gives me a look like she thinks I’m either a liar or an idiot. “Of course I can. You’re right there. My eyes work just fine.”

  “What do I look like, then?”

  She takes a step closer. “Brown hair. Blue eyes. Pretty. You have weird clothes.”

  “How are they weird?”

  “I’m not being mean,” she says defensively. “They’re just all one piece, all over and kind of blue and glowy. Even your hands and feet. Nobody I know has clothes like that.”

  As she speaks, I become aware of something blue, and when I direct my attention toward it, I do see a body, faintly glowing blue everywhere.

  It’s my body. The shape of it, anyway. I certainly never had any luminescence before.

  Hands. I see hands. When I
think about them, I can actually feel them.

  I raise them toward me and am shocked when I feel a face. It’s my face, and my hair. I can really feel them, with my hands, as if they’re real.

  “How did you do that?” I ask her.

  “Do what?” She smiles innocently.

  Does she have a body because it’s the only type of existence she can understand? Does she perceive me as a person because she doesn’t know any better?

  But if that’s all it is, why do I look like me?

  I’m confused, but elated, and I don’t know what to do.

  “What’s your name?” she asks. “I already told you mine.”

  “Oh. That’s right, you did. I’m Jennika. And I’m so glad to meet you.”

  “Why?” Ashta stares at me with curious eyes.

  “What?”

  “Why?” the girl repeats. “Why are you glad to meet me?”

  I choose my words slowly and carefully. “Well, I’ve been lonely and needing a friend. It’s been a while since I had a friend. How about you?”

  “I have lots of friends,” Ashta answers. “Bennie, Crystal, Carson, Issy, NaNa, Hans, and my cousin Mika. More, too. Why don’t you have friends? Do you forget to share? People don’t like that.”

  “I always try to share,” I say. “How long has it been since you saw your friends?”

  “Yesterday for my birthday party. It was fun. I got this dress.” She grabs fistfuls of pink fabric to hold the dress out from her body.