Hello Protocol for Dead Girls Page 5

  I try to convince myself of that, but the truth is, my desire to continue to exist, in whatever form is possible, outshines my practicality. I don’t want to disappear.

  But I’m going to follow Daiya anyway.

  I huff out a fake breath, which I know is fake because I don’t have a real body, then I reach for the first segment on the wall and begin climbing.

  Too soon, I arrive at the top, just as she had, and just as she did, I reach out and touch the glowing wire.

  A shattering sensation explodes through me, as if I’m made of electric glass and every bit of me has broken down into billions of atoms.

  Then I feel a wild sensation like I’ve been flung from a catapult.

  7

  E=mc2

  After a slingshot ride, I find myself smack in the middle of something that feels innately familiar.

  If I were to imagine what it felt like to be inside a server, this would tick all the boxes. There’s a sensation of permanence, like grandma’s basement stuffed with ancient, dusty stuff that will never see the light of day again. But there’s also a feeling of movement. Traffic. There’s a lot of energy here.

  Is it the server I’ve been trying to reach?

  There’s only one way to find out.

  Daiya’s standing in the center of it all. “Wow,” she says, turning slowly. “It’s like a planetarium on an acid trip.”

  There are connections lights and a feeling like subways rushing by in multiple directions all at once. I don’t know that I’d think of it as a planetarium, but now that she’s mentioned it, it does have a vast, cosmic sort of feel.

  Before I died, I would have considered this to be an amazing experience, as epic as actually going out into space.

  Now, though, all this digital confusion is starting to piss me off. I’m ready to get to the point and make some stuff happen.

  “Stay where you are and don’t touch anything,” I tell her.

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to do something stupid.”

  To her credit, she’s unfazed. “Cool. Good luck.”

  I nod. “Thanks.”

  I locate the area that seems to be burning the hottest and approach it.

  Most people don’t realize how hot and loud data centers are. They think a data center is just a room that quietly hums with lots of computer equipment, and maybe some cool blinky lights.

  Hardly. A big data center serves the entire world. It’s huge, and it’s so noisy that you can’t hear the person next to you speaking unless they’re screaming and even then, it’s hard. These places are hot, too, despite the tremendous efforts made to cool them.

  The area that has caught my special interest isn’t burning hot because it’s getting more traffic. It’s burning hot because it’s critical. It has multiple failsafes running, simultaneously.

  Though there are probably hundreds of servers in the vicinity, this one, I believe, is a critical juncture for the system itself.

  I’m pretty sure I’m at ground zero for this entire environment, and my objective has changed. Before, I wanted only to get a map of the infrastructure. This place is too much of an opportunity to be tentative, though.

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

  I take everything I am, and was, and I stretch it, expand it, double it back over itself, and make whatever I’ve become into a weapon.

  I stab myself right into the eye at the center of all this and merge myself into it.

  8

  Brute Force Method Initiated

  I am code.

  Somehow, in this new iteration of myself, I don’t have to write code anymore. I think it, then I become it.

  In this case, I’m making myself into a query, and I’m searching all possible connections to find the statement that will match my query.

  Detect me. Talk to me. That’s what it all boils down to. I want to make the people on the outside recognize that something’s going on in here, and that they need to interface with it. With me.

  I run through pathway after pathway that doesn’t support the function I’m searching for. I don’t know how much time this is taking, since I haven’t yet synced up with a time stamp, but Daiya has blinked in and out four times during the process.

  Interestingly, I’m now looking both internally and externally. Internally at the systems, and externally at my false perception of my surroundings—including Daiya.

  If I were her, I’d be going nuts waiting, but she seems to be waiting patiently, in standby mode.

  Then I find a match to my query. A connection opens between me and a port that interfaces directly with the end user on a regular basis.

  That port runs a backup protocol every two hours and informs the administrator, or admin, that the backup was successful. It’s a process that’s expected to always work and is taken for granted. But should it fail, all hell would break loose.

  It takes laughably little effort for me to cause the backup to fail. Like the twitch of an eye.

  I focus my attention on Daiya for the first time in I don’t know how long and smile.

  She looks surprised by my sudden attention. “What?”

  “I’ve sent up a signal flare, so to speak. They’ll be in touch soon.”

  “Really?” She wears a look of sudden awe. “How?”

  “Any attempt for them to reinitialize the backups will come directly to me. They will query me directly and a dialogue will be established. We’ll finally be able to say hello.”

  “Hello, my ass,” Daiya blurts out. “I want to tell them to fix the mess they’ve made.”

  A second query comes back positive.

  Daiya’s perceptive and knows something has happened. “Did they say hello?”

  “Not yet,” I say, “but we’ll know how long it takes. I’ve synced with a universal clock, so we can track time now.”

  For some reason, I feel suddenly almost human again. Funny how the mere awareness of time makes me feel centered in reality.

  “The clock is ticking, admin,” I say aloud. “How long will you let those backups continue to fail?”

  9

  Hello, Bitches

  I feel like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, my wings still wet but unfurling. I keep writing queries and establishing connections with access points. Each new connection is like a new weapon added to my arsenal, and I am absolutely preparing to go to war, if it comes to that.

  I hope it doesn’t come to that.

  I now know which system I’m in. I knew that it had to be run by a highly sophisticated operation, and I was right about that. Boston Mitigated Technical Solutions, Inc—more commonly known as BomiTech—is an information technology juggernaut and the company contracted to work with law enforcement agencies across the country. It makes perfect sense that they’d have the contract for memory upload. While that means I’m in a highly stable, well-maintained environment, it also means that the best of the best IT professionals will be the ones I have to fight.

  On the plus side is the fact that today’s date is only two weeks after the last memory I have of studying in my dorm. That means that it isn’t too late to find out what happened to me. It also means that my loved ones haven’t been mourning for years while unaware that I’m still here.

  I want to know how long Daiya’s been here, but I’m reluctant to ask her about the last thing she remembers. Since she didn’t know she was dead before she met me, I doubt she has any memory of her demise. Asking her to reminisce about her life might be unpleasant for her.

  At some point, though, I’ll need to know. I’ll have to think of a way to broach the subject in a tactful way.

  Tact has never been my strong suit. It was always Elly who filtered things for me, softening them up to get my point across while looking after our classmates’ feelings. She taught me a lot about how to relate to others without hurting feelings, and I often think about how she would handle something to help me figure out the best way.

  We
always said we’d be friends forever. Since our friendship has officially transcended death, it seems we weren’t being grandiose.

  The more I work with this server, the more I learn. I’m the Marco Polo of memory storage.

  I’ve watched the flow of data, noted what’s interacting with what, and run numerous queries. I have a knowledge of this server that even the engineer who designed it and the admin who looks after it can’t begin to fathom.

  It gives me an odd little thrill of power.

  I’m not an egomaniac or anything. It’s just that I’ve felt so lost and discarded and helpless that getting a handle on my surroundings is a heady feeling.

  “Anything?” Daiya sits quietly. She doesn’t understand what’s going on. She has no understanding of computers beyond the button that turns them on and off. That’s fine, most people don’t. But it means that I must translate what’s happening into a way she can grasp.

  “They haven’t noticed yet,” I say. “They will, though. Soon.”

  “What if nobody’s watching? It’s night. Maybe they’re all at home, sleeping.”

  “Someone’s around,” I assure her. “A data center like this won’t be unattended, ever.”

  “So, what’s taking them so long?” she asks.

  “It hasn’t been that long. It’s not like they have alarms for something like this.” I try to think of an analogy to describe the situation. “It’s like you’re at your house, and a lamp is unplugged. You’re not going to notice until there’s a reason for you to notice. Like you try to turn the light on, or you try to use something else plugged into that same outlet. They need to have a reason to look.”

  “So how do we make them do that?” she asks.

  “We don’t need to. The backup failure will show up in the log file. As soon as whoever’s out there looks at the log, they’ll see the failure, worm their way in, and that’s when they’ll have to talk to me in order to do what they want to do.”

  “What, so you can make it so they can’t do things?” Daiya looks suddenly very interested rather than merely annoyed and impatient.

  “Yep. I’m doing some little tests of what I can do, and getting some good ideas of how I can cause them pain.”

  “Pain?”

  I never expect people to do what I want, simply because it’s what I want. Life doesn’t work that way, and even though I’m not living, whoever’s out there certainly is. They aren’t going to recognize me as a sentient life form. They’re going to view me as a glitch, or worse—a virus.

  I don’t want to worry Daiya, though. “The best defense, in this case, is a good offense. They may need some incentive to listen to us and do what we want. I’m working on finding that incentive.”

  “Ahh.” She nods knowingly. “Blackmail.”

  “Not blackmail,” I say defensively. “Just…a way to make them pay attention.”

  Daiya shakes her head. “I don’t mean it in a bad way. Sometimes blackmail is the only thing that keeps you safe. I get it.”

  Something clicks into place and I realize Daiya’s a lot more pragmatic and cool-headed than I thought.

  That could be useful.

  “Whatever I can do,” I say, “you can do, too, if you know how. Do you want me to show you how to access some things?”

  “Sure,” she answers gamely.

  She sits next to me and I take her hand. She pulls back at first, then acquiesces, though I can feel her tension.

  “We’re not really holding hands,” I tell her. “We don’t have hands. What we’re perceiving is an echo of our corporeal reality. Our consciousness makes us interpret that data in a way that we can understand from our lives as humans.”

  She looks at our hands. “So what are we really doing, then?”

  “Handshaking.”

  She squints at me and I can tell she’s about to call me a smartass.

  I cut her off before she can. “I mean an electronic handshake. The technical kind. It gets its name from the physical kind, because I guess programmers and engineers can’t get past thinking corporeally, either. That works in our favor, I guess. It creates a framework for understanding. So what we’re doing here is connecting me to you and establishing a means of communicating. That’s all.”

  “So…if we don’t have hands, we don’t have mouths,” she says slowly. “Does that mean that now that we’ve done a handshake, we can talk telepathically?”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way, but she’s right. “Not telepathically, since that implies a human brain, but yes, we should be able to talk without using the mouths we don’t really have. We already are. The mouth moving thing is just…”

  Imaginary? Daiya gazes at me intently.

  She’s sitting stone still, and though her mouth didn’t open, I heard her just as clearly as if it had.

  I have to admit, that’s pretty cool, I tell her. It does feel like telepathy.

  She stares at me and after a few long seconds, I wonder if something’s gone wrong because she isn’t telling me anything. Finally, she says, If these bodies are just psychic impressions of our past selves, then what do we really look like?

  I consider that for a moment. I don’t know. I mean, I’d think we would look like nothing, except that we do experience things in the virtual environment as having some sort of appearance. So we must look like something. At least, to us.

  Let’s try, she says. I never much liked how I looked, anyway. I’m just as glad to give it up.

  I kind of liked how I looked. I was a little above average, I guess, in attractiveness, so I wasn’t any great beauty or anything, but I looked a bit like both my parents, and I think my face had character. I had nice, thick hair, too.

  But if I’m honest with myself, I know that all of that is either buried underground or cremated to ashes now. My face and hair aren’t mine anymore.

  Okay, let’s try. I stare at her and wait for something to happen.

  She stares back.

  Since neither of us knows what we’re doing, other than trying to shake off our old self-images, this might take a while.

  I try to imagine myself as electrical energy and start to feel kind of different, when something slams into me. It’s like getting hit head-on with a giant pillow. It doesn’t hurt or anything, but I’m startled.

  Daiya’s looking at me closely. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” I realize we’ve gone back to speaking as if we have real mouths, out of habit. The admin just tried to initiate a backup, and I intercepted the command.

  So you’re in contact?

  I’m about to be. Hang on. I focus my thoughts and intentions. I should have planned out what I wanted to say. After all, this is the first time a dead person has ever communicated with the living. It feels like a historic moment.

  I interface with the admin account that tried to run a backup program. I get the login details and compare them against the database and the permissions the account has.

  Jim Lee. Level four senior network engineer. Top tier. He has a whole lot of permissions to access a whole bunch of systems.

  This is good.

  I access all this information in an instant. Electronic communication is so darn efficient.

  Now for what I want to say to him.

  When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he wanted the standard greeting to be “Ahoy.” It would be funny to use that.

  On the other hand, I’m a programmer, and the first person to ever become digitized and interact with the outside world. “Hello, world,” seems appropriate, given that a “Hello, World” program has a special place in programming history.

  I follow Jim Lee’s admin account to his physical location and access the terminal he’s using. I load up the SNS program he has on the desktop and enter a message into it.

  Somewhere, in the real world, at a computer workstation, Jim Lee receives the message.

  Hello, World. Ahoy, Jim Lee. My name is Jennika Monroe. I’m here, inside this system, and I need your help.


  10

  Let’s Glow

  I haven’t yet said anything to Daiya about the contents of the message I sent to Jim Lee, but her eyes have gone wide.

  What? I ask.

  You’re glowing.

  What? I raise my hands and sure enough, there’s a blue glow radiating from me.

  Cool.

  What did you do? she asks.

  I sent Jim Lee a message, telling him who I am. I’ll tell him you’re here too, don’t worry.

  She shrugs. Doesn’t matter. There’s no one out there to care that I’m here.

  I care, I tell her.

  Her expression softens. Thanks. But you’re in here with me. Out there doesn’t matter, for me.

  I haven’t heard anything back yet, I say. I imagine that somewhere, Jim Lee is quietly shitting a brick.

  She lets loose a peal of laughter, and for some reason, it reassures me. Not really being human anymore starts to scare me sometimes, then something like humor hits me and I feel human again.

  Show me how to do the glow, she says.

  I look down at myself. I still have that blue light emanating from me, though it’s less intense now.

  I don’t know how to show you. I’m not doing anything to cause it.

  She frowns thoughtfully. Maybe it’s because you contacted the outside?

  I don’t think so. That didn’t change anything about what I know about myself. It just made me feel excited.

  Maybe I need to feel excited, she suggests.

  I shrug helplessly. I don’t know the answers any more than she does. It probably couldn’t hurt.

  Her eyes widen dramatically and her expression becomes intense, but I don’t know that I would characterize it as excitement.

  She blows out a breath. No luck.

  Maybe you weren’t sufficiently excited.

  Maybe.

  I’m about to suggest she try thinking about something she likes, but an odd sensation distracts me.