Hello Protocol for Dead Girls Read online

  It’s impressive and a little unnerving.

  “So now what?” Her voice is strong again and shows none of the brief vulnerability she’d shown.

  “If what I saw was accurate, then this is a router.”

  “A what?” Her expression is blank.

  She’s clearly not familiar with networking. There’s no real reason she should be, but it will make explaining things harder. “The details don’t matter much,” I say. “This is just a place where signals from different directions get sent this way or that way. It’s like, um, a bus station. Traffic gets routed this way or that way. This place doesn’t have anything we want. We’re going that way.” I point ahead. “The server I want should be that way.”

  Daiya nods slowly. “Okay. So how do we get there?”

  “To be honest, I was kind of hoping there would be some opening or blinking light or something kind of obvious. I’m not seeing anything. Are you?”

  She turns around slowly, her head tilted back, scanning everything. “Not a damn thing.”

  She sighs. “Are we really inside a computer?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “We really are.”

  She stretches her hands out in front of her, looking at them. “And our bodies aren’t real?”

  “No. They’re some kind of residual self-image.”

  “Think I can make myself taller?” she asks.

  Of all the things she might have said about adapting to a digital existence, this was not one of the things I anticipated. “Why?”

  “I always wanted to be taller. And if this isn’t real anyway, shouldn’t I be able to change it?”

  It sounded reasonable to me. “I guess you could try.”

  Her eyes narrow in concentration and her face grows increasingly strained. Finally, she blows out a breath and shakes her head. “Guess not. Unless I look taller?”

  I shake my head regretfully. “Afraid not.”

  “Darn.” A small smirk shows that she has a quirky sense of humor, which, in this case is a good thing.

  I need her to be able to handle the bizarre and the seemingly impossible, because I don’t know if I can do this without help.

  Heck, I don’t know if I can do it with help. Theoretically, Daiya and I aren’t supposed to be in here along with our memories, so given that we’re already doing the supposedly impossible, any further theorizing and supposition really is just a time waster.

  “Before,” I say, “when I was going from one place to another, I just imagined going and moved in that direction. If it worked then, it should work now, right?”

  Daiya looks less than convinced, but she shrugs. “Let’s give it a try.”

  I reach for her hand, but as my fingers graze hers, she yanks her hand away.

  “I just want to make sure we stay together,” I say. “Some kind of connection, maybe, will keep one of us from going astray somehow.”

  “You think?”

  I shrug. “No idea. I’m making this up as I go. But when writing code, a simple ‘and’ can be a very powerful thing. Just that one little thing can break things or fix them.”

  I hold out my hand.

  Looking extremely dubious, she takes it.

  Together, we walk forward.

  We bump into the wall.

  “Okay, so that didn’t work.” I bite my lip, trying to think what to try next.

  “Can we stop holding hands now?” Daiya asks dryly.

  “No,” I say, and to be honest, I’m mostly lying. I just want to pay her back a little bit for her snarky attitude.

  The answer to why we couldn’t get through hits me. “We hit a firewall. Crap. It seems we can’t just go wherever we want. We won’t be able to get into areas we don’t have permissions for.”

  Daiya frowns. “So how do we get permissions?”

  “Some network admin person would have to give them to us. And if we could get in touch with someone like that, then that would be all we need. So that’s not helpful.”

  “Okay,” Daiya says slowly, thinking. “So how does whatever-it-is know that we don’t have permissions?”

  “Access usually happens via login, but there’s no way I can just hack that.”

  “But we’re nothing,” she says. “Just electrical currents, or code, or whatever. Can’t we just make ourselves into what it wants?”

  “No, we—” I stop abruptly. By oversimplifying something very complicated, she may have just come up with a great idea.

  I look up at the routers above us.

  Daiya follows my gaze. “Whatever I said that’s making you think whatever you’re thinking, I take it back.”

  “No, it’s a great idea,” I say, injecting enthusiasm into my voice to hopefully come across as highly convincing.

  She doesn’t need to know that I have no idea what I’m doing.

  “What, exactly, is a good idea?” She’s low-key tugging her hand away, but I hold fast.

  I point upward. “All we need to do is identify a packet that’s going where we want to go, and jam ourselves into it. It already has the right permissions, by nature of what it is.”

  “How do we know where it’s going?”

  “I’ll have to identify the right path. Then whatever’s going that way will be whatever we hitch a ride on.”

  “And if we can’t get off, or out, or whatever?” she demands.

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “I’ve never been dead and trapped inside a cyber environment. I’m kind of working it out as I go.”

  She glares at me as if I’m the source of all her troubles. I don’t take it personally. I’d love to have someone to blame for everything, too.

  Blame can be a very useful mechanism. Elly, Bryce and I used to have a system for it. If the three of us had been hanging out, and one of us left, then that person became the sole cause of everything we did that our parents didn’t like.

  Who didn’t close the garage door? Who scuffed the floor? It was convenient to blame anything messy or destructive on Bryce, since he’s the most likely to do that anyway. He’s tall with a big build and tends not to know his own strength. Of course, we had to clean up, fix, or replace whatever we’d blamed on the missing third person, but having someone who was not present to blame it on avoided a lecture from whichever parental figure was on duty at the time.

  We all took our turns being the blamed.

  I look at Daiya, and she has a weird expression. “What?”

  “Where did you go?” she asks.

  I realize she’s let go of my hand. “What do you mean? I was just remembering something.”

  “No, you left. You were gone for a while.”

  I stare at her. “Left? As in, you couldn’t see me anymore?”

  “No, left as in you went really far to the left and just kept going left until you were the leftiest lefter who ever lefted. Yes, I’m saying I couldn’t see you anymore!”

  Daiya’s funny when she’s mad.

  “How long was I gone?” I ask.

  “I don’t exactly have a watch.”

  “Well, did it feel like a long time?”

  She scowls. “You didn’t blink out and come right back. I had plenty of time to wonder about this place you’ve gotten me stuck in, and think about what I’d do next.”

  “Did you decide anything?”

  “I was thinking I’d go back through the hole. Maybe see where else I might be able to poke around.”

  “Going back wouldn’t help us,” I say. “We’d just be moving from useless place to useless place.”

  “Maybe for you,” she says. “We don’t have the same goal, I don’t think. It’s not like I have anyone I’m trying to say my goodbyes to. My boss at the convenience store would have just assumed I’d quit, and find someone to replace me. My old social worker would eventually track down what happened to me, maybe feel a little sad, then go right on about her life. Kids who age out of foster care end up in the morgue at a much higher rate than the average.”

  I’ve never seen s
omeone look so bitter.

  “At least we can let someone know we’re in here,” I tell her. “At least that would be something, right?”

  But she’s gone. Like a light turning off, she’s simply not where she was a moment ago.

  She was thinking of her past. That’s what happened to me, too. When we think about the lives we had, we go into some dormant state or sleep mode or something.

  Well, crap. How long is she going to be gone? I don’t want to leave her behind, but I feel like I can’t just wait around, either. For all I know, years are slipping away, and my parents, Elly, and Bryce might die of old age before I get the chance to make contact with the outside world.

  I’ll briefly wait for Daiya, but then I’ll have to move on and try to find her again later.

  I focus my attention on the routers above me, and the paths going into and out of them. Without the network design in front of me, I can’t tell for sure what’s what.

  One by one, I look at the largest paths going from the routers in the direction I want to go. They have different feels to them. Everything here has a sort of frequency—a humming, vibrating energy. Some are slow and steady, some are fast and intermittent. Most are somewhere between.

  How am I supposed to pick one without sufficient information? I’ve never been one for just flinging myself into something willy-nilly. I like a logical sequence of events. This seems like a particularly bad time for me to start being reckless.

  On the other hand…what do I have to lose? I’m already dead. Living responsibly sure didn’t increase my time on Earth. Maybe doing something impulsive and reckless just this once might work in my favor. I can try it out and avoid exposing Daiya to any potential hazards. She seems like she’s been through enough already. She doesn’t need me adding to her difficulties.

  Right. I’ll pick one of these paths, climb in, and see what happens. If it works out, I’ll come back for Daiya. Hopefully, she’ll be back soon. If not, then I’ll have to think about really moving on without her for now.

  Which path? I don’t have any objective means of choosing. Nothing about any of the pathways leading in the direction of the server calls to me. Which one appeals to me, then?

  There’s one that has a somewhat constant, higher-pitched hum, and it reminds me of my parents’ refrigerator.

  Is that a good enough reason to select one path over another? In the absence of any other indicator, I decide to just go with my choice before I have a chance to talk myself out of it.

  I reach up to it, imagining myself walking toward it and colliding with it.

  A strange sensation consumes me. It reminds me of the pull of water when draining a bathtub, but my whole body is feeling it.

  I’m inside a rushing, sliding cloud. No, that’s not exactly right. It seems like I’m surrounded by a cloud while going down a water slide. When I was alive, I loved roller coasters and water parks, so I bet I’d have loved this, if I wasn’t so terrified about what’s happening to me.

  Why didn’t I wait for Daiya? If she or Ashta had been with me, I would have felt responsible for their wellbeing, and I wouldn’t have done this.

  I wasn’t so impulsive when I was alive. Death has changed me, I guess.

  With an odd zapping sensation, I suddenly fall out of the tube and find myself…somewhere.

  Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific because experiencing a computer network from the inside has absolutely nothing to do with what it looks like on the outside.

  I have few clues to work with.

  A horrible sound assaults me and I shrink down, covering my ears, only to realize that this isn’t an external sensation. It’s happening in my head, or whatever it is I have that passes for a head these days.

  6

  Boss of the Unknown

  You stupid idiot, where did you go?

  Bright lights flash and suddenly, Daiya’s standing in front of me, looking at me like she’d kill me if I weren’t already dead.

  She opens her mouth to continue berating me, but I hold up my hand.

  I say, “You can yell at me some more in a minute, but first, how did you do that? Did you come through the tube?”

  “Do what? And what tube?”

  “How did you make me hear you when you were somewhere else, and how did you get here?”

  She scowls at me, and for a minute, I think she’s going to hit me. Interestingly, I don’t flinch away because I know that whatever she does, she won’t actually be hitting me. It will only seem that way, but it won’t be real.

  I think I’m starting to adjust to an altered plane of existence, just a little.

  But she doesn’t strike out at me. “One second, you were standing there and the next second, you were gone, so I just focused on you and got mad. I blipped in here.”

  She shrugs.

  “Blipped?” I repeat.

  “What else do I call it?” she asks. “I was in the other place, I thought about how I wanted to wring your neck, and it felt like a rubber band snapping me to here.”

  “Huh.” I wish I had something smarter to say, but I really don’t.

  “Why did you leave?” Her voice is angry, but it’s not telling the truth. She felt scared and abandoned.

  Of course she did. She spent her life as a foster kid, being kicked out and passed to someone else on a regular basis.

  I shouldn’t have left without her.

  “You went into some sort of sleep mode,” I said. “You disappeared, and I was the one who was alone. I thought I’d check something out while I waited for you to come back. I didn’t ditch you. I swear.”

  “What do you mean, sleep mode?” she asks. The false anger has dissipated and now she just seems forlorn and uncertain.

  I say, “Were you thinking about your life, before I appeared to be missing? Be careful. Don’t start thinking what you were thinking then, or you might blink out again.”

  “Yeah,” she says cautiously. “I was.”

  “I suspect that when we think about our lives, we go into some kind of data loop that puts our active consciousness into some kind of sleep mode,” I tell her. “So we need to be careful about getting nostalgic.”

  She purses her lips thoughtfully, then peers at me curiously. “Do you think that’s how it’s supposed to work? They upload us here, and we just dwell on our memories while they pick them apart?”

  I hadn’t thought of that, but it makes sense. “Maybe.”

  “Well then that kind of sucks,” she says. “We need to make contact with them to let them know what they’re doing to people. It isn’t okay to torture us this way.”

  Is this torture?

  I like to think I’ve handled this turn of events well, but would it have been more humane to just let my memories and consciousness disappear?

  Probably. I ache to contact my parents, Elly, and Bryce, and that’s probably nothing compared to someone who was in love or had children.

  I try to imagine if I had someone special in the living world, someone I’d made promises to. Knowing that they were grieving over me and wanting to get back to them to take care of them would probably rip me to shreds.

  Yeah, this could be a form of torture, in some circumstances.

  Maybe even for me, if I never manage to contact the outside world. What should I do then? Continue banging around in here until they decide to delete my data? Hope they’d finally put an end to me? Or would I be dreading that idea?

  I don’t know what’s worse.

  “We do need to make contact,” I agree. “In order to do that, we need to figure out where we are. Or, at least, how to get to my intended destination in the server.”

  “Okay.” Daiya looks around. “How do we do that?”

  “Good question.”

  “You didn’t have a plan?” She stares at me.

  “Well, I did,” I say defensively. “But it was a loose plan, as in, get here and see what it is. It’s not like I have experience with what we’re trying to do. As far as I kn
ow, it’s never been done.”

  She mutters, “I never intended to be a trailblazer.”

  For some reason, this strikes me as funny, and I involuntarily snort out a strange, short laugh.

  She gives me a sideways, startled look, then smirks. “So, what should I be doing here?”

  Her tone has softened, and she sounds almost friendly.

  “Find a way out. Or in. Or figure out what’s passing through. Or…something.” I wish I had a better answer.

  “Right.” She nods. “We’re winging it. Well, you’re in luck. Kids who’ve spent their lives in the system are experts at winging it.”

  The noise was the first thing I noticed here, because it’s dark and loud. But now that I focus my attention, I can see a floor and walls. I don’t know what these things represent, since I’m not actually in a room of any sort, but there are structures spanning the walls, traversing almost the entire length of a wall, and moving upward.

  Daiya shrugs, puts a foot on the bottom structure, and reaches up.

  “I don’t know if you should do that,” I say.

  “What else is there to do?” she counters, not even pausing as she climbs up ledge after ledge.

  She’s brave. I admire that. She doesn’t have my knowledge of virtual environments, but she’s not letting that hold her back. She’s pushing forward in the only way she knows how.

  I’m starting to like her.

  The sound around me goes from a cacophony and condenses down to a weird, vibrating hum.

  Daiya reaches the top of the wall. “There’s a thing here. I’m going to grab it.”

  “Wait!” I shout, but it’s too late. She grabs hold of what looks like a glowing wire, then she’s glowing, and her glow begins to flow into the wire’s glow.

  Then she’s gone.

  “Well, shit.” I have to follow her. It’s my fault she did that. But I don’t know what happened to her, or what will happen to me, and what if I’m just following her into some virus quarantine, which will be one short hop away from permanent deletion?

  On the other hand…so what if that’s what happens? I’m dead. I’m supposed to be gone. Who’s to say that wiping out my consciousness wouldn’t be better for me in the long run?