Hello Protocol for Dead Girls Read online

  “It’s really pretty,” I say admiringly.

  Ashta doesn’t seem to have any perception of time, since it isn’t likely that she died just yesterday. The girl’s perception of her new reality is grossly at odds with my own perception. Maybe that’s just a matter of age. She’s still young enough to believe in magical thinking. She can ignore things that don’t make sense because to a little kid like her, most things don’t make much sense.

  On the other hand, her perception has bled into mine when it comes to the way I’m able to see her as a person.

  Impulsively, I step forward and reach my hand out toward the child. When my hand touches her arm, it feels soft and warm, like a real child’s skin.

  It’s just like I remember life to be.

  Ashta turns her arm and puts her small hand neatly in mine. “Are we going somewhere?”

  “If we were, where would we go?” I ask in a playful tone. I suddenly, desperately want to know everything Ashta knows about this place, but I have to be careful how I ask. I don’t want to upset her or tip her off to the fact that she’s dead.

  “How about the blue room?” Ashta asks. “It looks a lot like your clothes, so you might like it.”

  “I don’t know where that is,” I tell her. “Can you show me?”

  Ashta smiles, and an adorable dimple appears in her left cheek. “Sure. This way!”

  She tugs me to the left.

  What will I do if Ashta realizes what’s really happened to her? I don’t want to be responsible for a hysterical dead child. It’s not like I can call her mom to calm her down and while I have decent experience with kids due to babysitting, this is way out of my league.

  In spite of the risk, though, it feels indescribably humanizing to hold the girl’s soft, warm little hand.

  3

  The Blue Room

  We start off walking toward this blue room that Ashta referred to. I feel like I’m actually swinging my legs and rolling from heel to toe with each step. After a few steps, I have a sensation of shrinking smaller, and the motion turns into more of a fluid sensation, like I’m a fast-moving cloud.

  It's weird, like some sort of wonderland acid trip.

  I haven’t let go of Ashta’s hand, but when I look down, I can no longer see it. I still feel it, though, and I maintain that grip as if my life depends on it.

  Ha ha. Life. I might have to invent some new language to refer to things, since some of the phrases uttered by the living sure don’t make sense for me now. It’s kind of funny, and yet, on the other hand, is so very much not funny.

  We drift into someplace and I feel like I’m getting bigger and growing more solid. Our hands—Ashta’s and mine—reappear, still clasped together.

  “See?” she asks. “The blue room.” She looks very pleased with herself, having proven that she knew something I didn’t.

  “How did you find it?” I ask without looking at her. Instead, I’m looking at the beams of blue light running parallel and perpendicular to one another. Some of them have a pair of ninety-degree angles to direct them lower, below other sets of beams. It’s like an awe-inspiring highway of light.

  I try to fit what I’m seeing into what I know about how massive mainframes function. There’s an answer somewhere in all this. I just need more data in order to find it.

  She shrugs and balances on one foot, holding her hands out to her sides. “I just did. I got bored. I thought if I looked around a little bit, I might find my mom.”

  I want to ask her more pointed questions, but am afraid of upsetting her. To keep her engaged with me, I copy her stance, balancing on my right foot with my hands out to my sides. “What were you doing before you came here?”

  I keep my tone light and look down at my foot because I don’t want her to see any hint of how important this question is to me.

  “I was at the playground,” she says.

  I look up at her and search her expression. She was at a playground, then she died, and her mind was uploaded here. She doesn’t show any signs of distress. I don’t think she knows any more about how she died than I do.

  Is it routine to cut away the death event from the rest of the memory? Maybe that’s the only part they keep. If so, what does that mean for the rest of me? Maybe I’m in some recycle bin right now, sitting on some cop’s desktop display.

  Maybe I’ll blink out of existence at any moment.

  I don’t want that.

  It might be better for me, really, than being trapped inside a machine, doomed to exist in a noncorporeal fashion like this. But I don’t want to just disappear.

  I want…

  What do I want?

  Well, I want my life back. I want to do all the things I meant to do with my life. But since that isn’t an option, I at least want to figure out what happened to me and tell my parents, Bryce and Elly.

  Maybe once I’ve been able to do that, I’ll have that closure thing people talk about, and will be okay with getting purged.

  It’s been a while since Ashta or I said anything, but she’s bouncing on her toes and doesn’t seem to have noticed a lag in conversation.

  I need to establish a hello protocol with the outside world.

  “Ashta,” I say gently. “I’m actually looking for my mom, too. I think we both got a little lost in here somehow. But I’m hoping we can help each other, and find a way to contact our moms.”

  “Like a phone?” she asks, a hopeful expression on her face.

  “Exactly. You haven’t seen anything like that, have you?”

  “If I had, I would have used it,” she answered tartly. “I know my phone number.”

  I smile at her indignance. “Of course. Silly me. You do seem to know this place a lot better than I do, though. Are there other rooms or things you can tell me about where we are?”

  Ashta’s face scrunches up in concentration. “Well, how much have you seen?”

  “Just the last place and this one.” I try to hold my hope down, but it’s like wrestling a giant helium balloon to the ground.

  “You haven’t seen the blinky place?” Ashta asks, surprised. “It was the first thing I saw here. I walked through the play gym tunnel and ended up in the blinky place. I tried to turn around and go back through the gym, but the door was closed or something. I couldn’t get back.”

  “No, I didn’t see a blinky place,” I say. “Can you take me there?”

  Ashta frowns. “I didn’t like it. It’s really loud. And the blinky lights were fun at first, but then they started getting on my nerves.”

  “But can you show me? You don’t have to stay there if you don’t want to.” I carefully add, “It might help me figure out how to call our moms.”

  Ashta lets out a long breath, then nods. “Okay. I’ll show you.”

  She reaches her hand out to me, but before my fingers can grasp hers, she disappears.

  Did Ashta just go into sleep mode? Did she get deleted?

  Am I about to get deleted?

  A mix of emotions rises in me. Fear, anger, and desperation leave me paralyzed with uncertainty.

  I still don’t know anything about where I am. My one possible source of information has evaporated. Or heck, maybe she was never even here. If I’m nothing more than some lines of code, then maybe that code is corrupted and I only imagined Ashta.

  Maybe I’m just a malfunctioning program, and any second, someone’s going to empty the recycle bin and I’ll be truly gone, and no one will even know the difference.

  “If you’re going to delete me, then just do it!” I shout into the blue room.

  I wait.

  Nothing.

  I’m still here. I have the same problem. I can’t just stay in place, waiting. Even if I am crazy, I might as well be doing something.

  I’m going to operate on the presumption that I’m not corrupted, because if I am, then nothing matters anyway.

  Right.

  The blue room.

  When Ashta was here, I did see a blue glow, but n
ow that she’s gone, there’s little to differentiate this place from where I was before.

  Why can she see things I can’t? Why do things look different when she’s with me?

  She’s a child, and if she understands any coding at all, it would be rudimentary. So then why can she see stuff and I can’t? It should be me who can see stuff.

  Frankly, I’m a little pissed off about this.

  Maybe she can see things because she doesn’t know she shouldn’t? She uses her imagination to see it. Then what? Maybe she transfers her delusion to me?

  Wait. Hang on.

  There’s something in that. Some thread of logic that fits with something else. What is it?

  Reality. Virtual reality. Perspective.

  Perspective is reality.

  Code is code. How that code is displayed is dependent on the hardware projecting it.

  I’m the software, in this scenario. So maybe if I take this ridiculous line of reasoning one step further, that means that I can take whatever code I am, whatever I’m experiencing, and choose to display it in another fashion.

  “I want to see the blue in this room.” I say it out loud rather than think it just because I can now, and there’s a whole lot more that I want to start being able to do. I want to make this place, wherever I am, into my personal sandbox. I want to rule it and bend it to my will and make it mine.

  Bright, glowing blue flares around me. Far more than what I saw with Ashta. This is like being bathed in a sea of light.

  I can’t believe that worked.

  Thrilled with my success, I try again. “I want to see all the access nodes in this system.”

  The brightness of the blue light enveloping me dims.

  Darn. I got too greedy. I should have gone with something simpler.

  An image sears itself on a surface that hadn’t been there before. At first, it looks like a constellation because it’s all lit up in white, but there are small bits of other color too, and I recognize the image for what it is.

  I’m looking at a network schematic of the entire local area network. I can see the servers, routers, switches, and, most importantly, the access nodes leading in and out.

  I can see all of it.

  Quivering with excitement, I map out the little bit I’ve seen against the bigger picture. First, where I am right now. It may be a recycle bin, but whatever this is, it’s located within a server. The first place I was in, before I met Ashta, was also a server, but a bigger one. This one is for local use only, with no WAN connections that can get me outside of the local network.

  Of course, I don’t need to get out of the local network. I just need to get somewhere that I can get a message to some server admin who will be able to figure out what’s going on.

  It would help if I had more awareness of the software running in here. Then I could see usage statistics and find something that someone will be monitoring.

  Maybe I can find something like that, but at least with this schematic of the hardware, I can start creating a strategy.

  One way or another, I’m going to make them hear me.

  4

  The Search for Socket

  I’m a programmer, not a network engineer. However, in the case of hacking, the better your networking is, the better you are at hacking.

  Not that I’m a hacker. Or ever wanted to be one. But my focus was always system security, and in order to protect something, I have to know how to breach it. To know my enemy, so to speak. To be able to make something strong, you have to know all the ways it could be broken.

  I guess my interest in security is really helping me out now, since I know a lot more about networking than a programmer who, for example, plans to code financial software all her life.

  Given my current predicament, I hesitate to call this luck, but at least it works in my favor. Given my situation, I’ll take whatever I can get.

  Like all networks, there are multiple ways to navigate the paths. My challenge is to find the path that will be easiest to follow while planning for something to go wrong.

  That’s the issue with networks. Even in the best-case scenario, a network is a patchwork of old, legacy systems which have been migrated to one thing or another, handed off to multiple teams, outsourced, insourced, retrofitted, cut back, and expanded. Multiple times over. More often than not, it’s a miracle it even works, and sometimes it really shouldn’t.

  In other words, when you go prowling around a network, you’re bound to find some crap that’s been set up in the most nonsensical way possible. Sometimes a configuration is so screwed up that there’s no telling why it even works. That’s a big danger because a tiny change in that situation that shouldn’t cause any harm can break a whole lot of stuff.

  If I start trying to brute-force my way around here, I might just cause a catastrophic failure. And since my existence is predicated on these systems, I’d really prefer to avoid a failure.

  I need to be cautious. That means I can’t take the most direct route to my first destination: a huge server with so many connections, it has to contain some usage statistics. That data should tell me which socket I want to tap into to establish contact with the outside.

  Rather than taking the quickest path to that server, I’ll be going a more circuitous route, for my own protection. A lot of connections here only go one way. It’s a security thing. But if I go through a one-way connection, I could end up trapped someplace I can’t get out of, and then I might as well be in some kind of existential purgatory.

  No, thank you. I’ll make sure that wherever I go to, I can also come back from.

  I take another look at the diagram in case something comes up and I need to deviate from my plan. But I know where I’m going, and I know how to get there.

  At least, I know the paths to take. As for moving myself elsewhere…I need to do it like Ashta does. She just moves place to place because she doesn’t know she can’t.

  I hope she’s in sleep mode and not deleted. I can’t think about the possibility of her having been obliterated by the click of a button.

  If I did, I’d have to think about the same thing happening to me.

  I orient myself so I’m facing the direction I need to go, and start walking.

  I’m not getting anywhere. It’s like one of those old-school cartoons where the characters are making a walking motion, but the background keeps recycling. My emotions cycle from worry and fear to desperation, then to frustration and anger. Finally, I settle into grim determination.

  Ashta moved from place to place, and so did I when I was with her. I’m going to keep walking no matter how long it takes me to get to the next place.

  I wonder where she went. I hope she’s okay.

  An odd tingling sensation manifests in my chest. It’s kind of like when a foot falls asleep, but this is right in the center of me, and it’s more intense. I feel energy building up there, or moving through me. Or doing something. It’s hard to describe when I don’t even know what I’m feeling. After all, I don’t really have a chest. I’m guessing that the impression that I do have one is a sensory ghost attached to my memory engrams. My consciousness is interpreting the available data in ways I can understand.

  That’s my theory, anyway. Given that this is my first time being dead in a cyber environment, I’m relying heavily on speculation.

  Hah. My best friend Elly always found my humor funny. I like to think that my mom’s chocolate chip cookies wooed her into being my friend, but my tendency to be verbose, along with my irreverence for pretty much everything, made her stick around.

  I couldn’t have asked for a better friend. She was like a sister I got to choose. I was as comfortable in her parents’ house as I was in my own, and vice versa. We even went to the same college, and jumped through a lot of hoops to be able to share a room. The college administrators didn’t want to let us do it, but Elly’s uncle was an influential alumnus, and he made a few calls on our behalf. Plus, she and I called every day. I think, more than anyth
ing, we wore them down until they gave in just so we would go away and leave them alone.

  We had so much fun together, and we didn’t even have to do much to have a blast. We watched movies, had impromptu dance parties, helped each other through dating nightmares and unrequited crushes, and most of all, we laughed.

  I want to let her know I’m not gone. Not entirely. She must be sick with grief. I know I would be if I was the one left behind. What must it be like for her to live in our dorm room with my absence screaming at her? She’ll probably ask for a different room. She should.

  Hang on. My thoughts wandered off and the tingly feeling stopped. I get my bearings and pay attention to where I am.

  Did I go into sleep mode? I feel like I blinked out and came back. Maybe that’s how it happens—thinking too much about my real life.

  Maybe it makes me recede into my own code?

  It feels true. I don’t know if that means anything.

  I wish I had some sort of user manual for being a disembodied consciousness trapped inside a memory storage device. I mean, I’ve never read a user manual for anything before, but that would be one worth the effort, I think.

  Okay, tingly feeling. Come back. Let’s move this along. I have things to do.

  I start walking again, envisioning my arrival in another place.

  It’s back! I feel the tingle and the flowing, sliding sort of feeling I had when moving from one place to another with Ashta.

  Something different forms around me. At first, I’m not sure what to make of it, but it’s different, and right now different is good.

  This place is weird, though.

  It’s like I’m on a highway, but instead of being a highway, it’s a tunnel, and it’s dark, and instead of vehicles passing me, they’re bright lights. Each light zings by at a crazy fast rate, making it look to me like a very linear shooting star streaking right by me.

  And the sound.

  The lights make sound as they go by, and I’ve never heard anything like it. It’s a vibrating sort of hum but enclosed, as if it’s going through a tube and getting muffled. The sound intensifies as the lights approach, then recedes as they go by.